Within the past month more than a dozen papers, ranging from The Times of London to the Chico (Calif.) Enterprise-Record have erected paywalls to block non-subscriber access to their online content.
Still to come: The New York Times, which will roll out its paywall early next year. The paper is developing its own software to govern access, based on a metered approach.
As the deployment of paywalls ramps up, however, so does the debate surrounding their worth and which models will ultimately be the most effective.
Among the strictest has been The Times of London's model. The publisher transitioned all of its content to paid in early July. Editor James Harding has been one of the most vocal proponents (along with parent company News International's backer Rupert Murdoch) of putting a stop to the free flow of content on the Web.
Gannett erected its first paywalls at the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat, the Greenville (S.C.) News and the Spectrum in St. George, Utah, on July 1, charging $9.95 a month to access the sites, with bundled Web and print subscriptions priced differently in each market.
MediaNews Group, meantime, said it will begin evaluating paywalls at the Enterprise-Record and the York (Pa.) Daily Record (see related story, Page One) using Journalism Online's Press+ platform to manage access to what it calls "member zones."
"We have wonderful newspaper subscribers so why would we give that content away?" Oliver Knowlton, president of MNG Interactive told News & Tech in April about the group's paywall plans. "By charging, you apply value to your product. It also forces us to rethink our online strategy in terms of broadening our audience and extending the reach of our online and print audiences."
Press+ gaining steam
Journalism Online's Press+ platform continues to forge ahead, with theSteven Brill and Gordon Crovitz-backed initiative claiming 1,500 newspaper partners as of June - although Journalism Online declined to release the names of papers to confirm that number.
Lancaster (Pa.) Newspapers was the first newspaper publisher to go live on the Press+ platform, converting its obituaries to a metered model in which out-of-town readers must pay $1.99 a month after they've accessed seven. Lancaster's annual access fee is $19.99.
Google, meantime, which previously said it intends to roll out a pay platform by the end of the year, has contacted newspapers to test a micropayment system called NewsPass, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
Mixed results
Despite the growth of paywalls and organizations such as Journalism Online supporting them, there continue to be mixed results on the success of longer-standing models like those of the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.
Newsday of Long Island, N.Y., reported declines in site traffic after placing a $20 price tag on its monthly site subscriptions last October; and The Valley Morning Star in Harlingen, Texas, in April reverted back to free Web content less than a year after instituting a pay model when its page views dipped.
As a result, newspapers' foray into online content monetization will likely be a long one as publishers take a wait-and-see approach to determine the best models to follow.
"We like The Wall Street Journal's strategy, where there are packaged prices and they have print, mobile and then iPad and offer some discount if you combine them," Marc Daily, circulation director for The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., said about his paper's evaluation of pay models.
Security debate heats up
Aside from the debates surrounding the potential of paywalls as a legitimate way to help newspapers recoup the losses they've sustained in advertising and readership, questions of security are increasingly emerging with the advent of sites like breakthepaywall.com. And David Brauer of MinnPost.com recently posted an article detailing the ease with which Lancaster Newspapers' paywall could be penetrated.
Such loopholes prompted iPhase 3 Corp. to begin courting newspaper publishers with its client server app as a distribution model (see related story, page 17). IP3 CEO Dan Kruger claims his company's client server platform offers more control over distribution than publishers have been able to achieve on the Web, and also offers better targeting.
"We don't want all the content that's on the Web in our system, we only want the content that's worth paying for," he told attendees of the fourth Individuated News Conference, held in Denver in June.
Kruger said iP3 allows only authenticated users, offering digital rights management that is transparent to the user and applied to all content and providing a single sign-on to view all content to which a user has access.
"We will go into broad scale beta later this year, and we are asking that newspapers put in a request to participate early," he said. "We will do small scale beta, then a larger scale beta and then launch sometime next year."
Some say no
Paywalls may never work for some publishers. The Chicago Sun-Times, for example has no plans to charge readers online, despite the fact that the publisher is redesigning all of its websites concurrently with its new editorial system rollout (see related story, page 18).
"We're still in a very competitive market," CEO and vice chairman Jeremy Halbreich told News & Tech. "We aren't the only media company covering Chicago, so does it make sense to put our sports behind a paywall, for example, when we aren't the only outlet covering sports?"
What' more, Halbreich said, "It hasn't been wholesomely demonstrated that there is a meaningful business there," adding that his company will continue to drive as much traffic as possible to its site to sell against, focusing on SEO and SEM.
"We are introducing online commerce features - not any of which is going to move the needle dramatically, but collectively they might," he said.
The Washington Post is another publisher in a competitive market that has said it has no immediate plans to restrict content.
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