The Economist magazine declared 2010 the “Year of the Paywall” earlier this year. The term paywall simply refers to a subscription to a news website. Declining print circulation and a lagging economy are forcing news companies to find new ways to make money.
People often predict the death of newspapers, but the fact is that newspaper readership has never been greater. In the past 12 months, over 700,000 different people have visited The Dispatch”s website. That”s 46 times our print circulation! Our challenge has been to figure out how to actually make money off of these online readers.
Like most other papers, we have been allowing our website visitors to view our stories, photography and features for free. We”ve been counting on Internet ad sales to pay for our online efforts, and though we”ve been pretty successful at selling Internet advertising, that market is still young and needs time to mature.
Many publishers are realizing that giving their news away online is directly contributing to their declining circulation. This may seem like an obvious conclusion, but you have to understand that the mantra from the past 10 years is that people are not willing to pay for content online. Historically, any talk of charging for access to news websites has been ridiculed.
Walter Hussman, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is one of the few who realized early on that giving content away online is bad business. He is also one of the few to have had the guts to stop giving it away. Eight years ago (an eternity in the technology world) Hussman installed a paywall on his website to help stop the loss of print subscribers. Until recently his paper was one of the few that touted paywalls. Talk of widespread use of paywalls has increased over the past 12 months though. At a recent Mississippi Press Association conference in Jackson, a speaker asked for a show of hands of the papers considering a paywall this year. About half the room raised their hands.
In addition to a few other state papers, The Vicksburg Post launched their paywall in May of this year and The Greenwood Commonwealth launched in July. Thursday, The Dispatch launches ours. There are many different types of paywalls. We have selected a metered paywall. This means that casual readers will be allowed a handful of free stories each month before they are asked to subscribe. If you read more than 10 stories every 30 days, we will ask that you subscribe to our website. Our print subscribers will be able to subscribe to cdispatch.com at a heavily discounted rate.
There are plenty of valid arguments for keeping a news website free; however, as this newspaper tries to find its place in this digital world, I believe this paywall is a healthy exercise. Online advertising is a market still in its infancy. Once publishers figure out how to sell effective ads and viewers learn to expect more than teeth whitening ads, news websites may make a healthy profit from advertising and go back to free access. Until then, expect to see more and more websites installing paywalls.
Peter Imes is publisher of The Dispatch. You can email him at [email protected].
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