Events | 2009.12.02
More pay, less wall: the websites that already successfully charge for content
Many websites already offer charging options – but few, as Rupert Murdoch seems to suggest, simply lock browsers out
From the hands thrown to cheeks at Rupert Murdoch\'s announcement that he\'s looking to put paywalls up around his newspaper properties online, you might think that they\'re the unicorns of the online world, spoken of but never glimpsed.
In fact, they\'re all over the place – and working well for their owners, though hardly any are simple, "pay to get in" walls. In fact, that\'s the least common of paywalls. Far more common are forms of the "freemium" model, where some content is free but others items are walled away for premium subscribers.
And freemium seems to work. The US sports network ESPN uses it for its "ESPN Insider" site, which offers video and extra reportage on upcoming games. You can also find it at the science journals Nature and Science, the science magazines New Scientist and Scientific American, the Lancet and similar medical journals, the Spectator (on its iPhone app). Even in the computing world – which, given that it deals with the internet, might seem like the proving ground for the failure or success of paywalls – there is charging for certain forms of content. The very popular Ars Technica site has a "premium" version, which offers "exclusive access to insightful Ars Technica content … live chats with Ars editors, industry innovators, and a seat at the editorial roundtable ... ad-free layouts, single-page article options, downloadable PDFs and access to full-text RSS feeds." (An RSS feed is the essential text of a page, such as this story, rather than its "furniture" such as the design.)
Similarly, Slashdot, one of the most popular sites among the cool and the nerdy programmers, has been offering a "subscription" service since 2002 that lets buyers view 1,000 of its pages without ever seeing an ad for $5. True, it\'s not much – and some Slashdot denizens would pride themselves on being able to prevent ads being shown by entirely programmatic, rather than financial means. But the move prompted a predictable row between those willing and unwilling to pay , which included one person who decided he\'d filter out the ads and also pay the $5. Clearly, if people value a site, they will pay for it, and Slashdot\'s power is in its community.
The Gigaom blog , which covers developments in computing and the internet, also offers "premium" content which it bills as "a revolutionary approach to market research" for $79 a year. And then there\'s LWN.net, a website offering news about the free open-source software market, which offers some content free, and other content for $5 a month. Similarly for Apple fans, there\'s Macjournals.com, which is delivered as an ad-free newsletter daily or weekly for $39.95 and $14.95 a month respectively.
Yet there have also been failures in the paywall struggle. In September 2005 the New York Times set up TimesSelect, which cost $49.95 a year (or $7.95 a month) and put its commentators and archive content behind a paywall; exactly two years later it dismantled it, having determined that advertising growth was larger than subscription growth. But it was not an outright "failure"; the New York Times says it got 227,000 paying subscribers – out of 787,000 overall – and generated about $10m a year in revenue.
The difference now is that advertising growth isn\'t looking so rosy. And that is believed to have driven the New York Time\'s executives back to their spreadsheets to see whether TimesSelect, or some descendant, might not be at least a partial answer to its troubled finances.
So – paywalls are not a mirage; nor are they a unicorn. They\'re out there and they work. The question that remains unanswered – until Rupert Murdoch implements something for his papers – is whether they will work for general newspapers. The real solution is "freemium": you offer a lot to lots of people for free (with ads), but you entice those at the high end with paid-for stuff. Never rule out freemium. It\'s incredibly powerful.
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