Study: Fear of paid content is unfounded
The fear of losing readers and the resulting financial losses—which is causing many newspaper publishers to shy away from introducing a paywall for their online content—appears to be completely unfounded.
According to a comprehensive analysis of data from Journalism Online, a company that supplies several US publishers with paid content systems, no significant changes can be seen in the number of visitors or in the advertising revenue generated after a changeover.
However, a closer look at the results revealed by Journalism Online reveals that the success of the introduction of a paid model also depends on the specific approach of the publishers, as Pressetext writes. Those newspaper publishers that were able to retain all of their readers in the course of the changeover all rely on a very conservative business approach, which at least allows site visitors to use a certain number of articles per month free of charge.
Publishing companies that are seriously considering a so-called "paywall" for their own online offerings are therefore advised by Journalism Online to use the somewhat toned-down version described above. "We encourage people to keep a certain amount of their content free so as not to choke off web traffic. If a cautious limit is set on the number of articles that can be consumed for free per month, up to 95 percent of readership will be retained," Steven Brill, the well-known US media manager and co-founder of Journalism Online, told the New York Times.
