The Paywall Debate

For anyone even slightly connected with online media, it cannot have escaped your notice that News International fairly recently introduced subscription-only access to their Times and Sunday Times websites. Superficially, everything looks the same, but as soon as you click to access an article’s details, up pops the paywall to demand payment for further progress.

If you look at the figures:

• £1 for first 30 days (circa 4 weeks)
• £2 per week thereafter (remaining 48 weeks of year)

This adds up to circa £97 for the first year, and £104 for ongoing years at the same rate.

Not particularly expensive really - only the unfortune result of doing anything unilaterally is that your potential customers can still get equally high quality journalism on dozens of other free / open sites.

The circa £100 per year is less expensive than a paper-based subscription, but there are significant downsides to being the only one with a paywall.

The numbers of users on the Times sites have supposedly fallen by in excess of 90%. And although a number of prospects have initially taken up the £1 per 30 days offer, we have yet to see what proportion of this extends their subscription beyond the introductory period.

I am one of those people who believes in paying the going rate for any given product or service. Yet while free options are available, the Times needs to have a significantly better quality of articles and exclusives to make its offering sufficiently attractive. I don’t believe this is the case. While everyone else is publishing their news for free online, at a similar quality, I believe the Times paywall cannot succeed.

There are glimmers of hope for paywalls - as witnessed by the Financial Times, which runs a fairly successful model of subscription. It can only do this though, because its content is largely specialist and unique. The Financial Times also has a 2 step system - allowing limited access for casualy users, and subscription access for power users. 90% of the reasons people read a daily newspaper can be satisfied by any number of different sites. With the arrival of celebrity and gossip blogs, this has taken much of the power away from many of the leading newspaper columnists also.

It is as we have always said of the Internet - if you want to enforce subscription, you need to offer something unique and of sufficient quality to justify said subscription. This is why paywalls will do very well for more specialised subject areas, whilst the Internet will always be overflowing with free generalist content. Even though all the major broadsheets decided to implement a paywall, I firmly believe a more enterprising organisation would come along to capture the major market share by offering a more clever model of advertising-supported or sponsored content. I don’t believe generalist newspapers can thrive behind paywalls.

What do you think?