- Chapter 2 -

To charge or not to charge?

The question of whether to charge for online content was high on the agenda of newspaper publisher across the English-speaking world and elsewhere in 2009, with the Economist dubbing 2010 "the year of the paywall". Undoubtedly, publishers need to find a way to make more money online if they are to continue to produce quality journalism. The majority of newspapers' revenue still comes from print, even as their online audiences continue to grow. But is charging readers directly the best way? Will they pay? Will it bring in enough revenue to support the journalism that newspapers hope to offer? Or would it be better to seek new business models based on pushing their content free to users and as wide as possible?

The Tindle Newspapers group, which publishes over 200 local and regional papers in the UK, decided in December that following the success of various paid content experiments, it would install paywalls at 40 titles. During summer 2009, Tindle began a subscription trial on six of its titles - three free papers and three paid for titles - using online page-turning software PageSuite and Paypal to secure subscriptions. Tindle said that the trial had been so successful that the cash generated from subscriptions soon exceeded expectations, with the group's Managing Diector, Brian Doel, commenting that such "an online move will help guarantee their (local newspapers) survival for the another 150 years."

Paywall! Nieman Lab's Jonathan Stray creadted a 'paywall calculator' named Paywall!, which aims to juggle the different factors that could go into building a paywall and find the best combination that could generate maximum revenue. Stray's model breaks the audience into five groups based on their number of views per month: fly-by, occasional, weekly, daily, and loyal. According to Stray, "a tuned paywall can make money for a large free site, but the details matter greatly. Reader reaction is key; small variations in response have big effects on net revenue."