NEWS ON NEWS. It had been rumored for a while now, but today the New York Times announced that as of midnight tonight, they'll be bringing down pay walls on their website, exactly two years after they started charging $49.95 a year for complete access to the site. The pay wall was deterring drop-in readers who came to the site from search engines, and it wasn't bringing in enough paid subscribers to justify its existence. There were only 227,000 paying subscribers, and the site gets an average of 13 million unique visitors every month.
Rupert Murdoch followed up on the announcement with his own public pondering about whether he should just take down the subscriber-only walls at the Wall Street Journal when News Corp. takes over in a few months. That site has fared much better in the pay-to-read realm, with one million paying subscribers who pay to get their news content. But Murdoch's betting that traffic at the site will increase to 30 million, and ad reps will come running for the chance to reach the generally educated, well-off Wall Street Journal readers.
This just illustrates what a bad idea the system was in the first place, especially for the Times. While their columnists have many faithful readers, not many of them are faithful enough to shell out cash to read what is largely lukewarm commentary. And legions of Googlers with their untapped potential page-views have been cast off into the internet abyss for the past two years, forced to find free information elsewhere, while the quality Times archive content languishes in obscurity. The WSJ had a slightly better model and prospects going into it, but not good enough to justify what they had to sacrifice in the process.
And what they had to give up was largely new readers, a terrible idea in an age when we spend a decent amount of time (and print space) bemoaning the fact that young people don't read enough news these days. It made zero short-term or long-term economic sense to cut off all of us young, potential readers in the place where most of us prefer to get our news, and get it for free. And these new readers bring more page-views, which brings more ad sales, which bring more money -- far more money than selling online subscriptions. So pay walls essentially add up to shooting yourself in the right foot, then shooting yourself in the left, and then going back and shooting the right foot again just to make sure you got it the first time.
Needless to say, I'm glad that's over.
--Kate Sheppard
