A few major publications have instituted pay walls, fees for reading online content, on their websites to compensate for the decrease in print revenue as traffic moves online.
The intent is to make enough money to keep the news industry alive, whether it be online or print or broadcast. It is widely known that advertisers are the key source of income for a newspaper. But pay walls could lower the amount of visitors to a site, and fewer visitors could mean fewer advertisers. Which, in turn, means papers could lose money by trying to charge people money.
One strategy in imposing pay walls is to push readers back to the print product, according to American Journalism Review's Paul Farhi. Another is to use the targeted advertising that paid registrations allow to boost online advertising fees to make a profit.
Recently, the New York Times began charging for prolonged online access, mobile applications and tablet subscriptions. According to a Columbia Journalism Review article about a panel discussion involving Publisher Arnold Sulzberger Jr. and CEO Janet Robinson, the Times' goal is not to convince more readers to buy the paper every morning.
“We made this decision to create a new revenue stream that provides us with the opportunity to continue to invest in the journalism that we create each and every day,” Robinson was quoted as saying.
A part of that new revenue stream is the price of premium advertisements. When readers register with a pay wall, a newspaper has access to their consumers’ demographics, which they can then sell to potential advertisers. Online newspapers also have “a 24/7 clickstream of their digital reading, researching, and shopping behavior,” according to a Newsonomics article written by Ken Doctor.
Farhi writes about a news provider that began charging for online content, but with a different objective in mind. A Rhode Island newspaper charged readers 38 percent more to read the paper’s website than to have a print subscription. In this case, the publisher wanted to push the readers back to the newspaper, Farhi quoted Newport Daily News Publisher Albert K. Sherman as saying.
In this day and age, it seems impossible for a news provider to do away with its online presence altogether. In order to compete with online news providers, which include Yahoo! and AOL and Google, papers seem to need an online home.
The pay walls could be disasters in the making or the salvation of newspapers-- only time and circulation numbers will tell.
--Rachel McCubbin
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