Major Papers Tightening Online Paywalls

February 22, 2013 Chad Bolender Leave a Comment

In 2011, The Grey Lady made waves by introducing its paywall. It received its share of praise and criticisms about its long term viability, ability to pay the bills, and potential alienation of its readership. Recently, several major US papers have followed the Times’ example by erecting paywalls of their own. Papers are plugging the gaps in their systems and the leaky paywall itself may become a thing of the past.

Washington Post

The Washington Post is the latest of the big papers to consider going behind a paywall. Rather than following the “charge first and ask questions later” strategy of some other sites, it is actively gathering information from its users beforehand. In preparation for its imminent block, visitors are being polled on:

• How often they read the site.
• What other sites they read,.How much would they pay?

As the Washington BizJournal reports:

There were three options… seven-day delivery and unlimited Web access for $24.95 a month, unlimited Web access without a print subscription for $14.95 a month, and Sunday delivery plus unlimited Web access for $7.95 a month.

Boston Globe

The Boston Globe previously allowed visitors from Social Media sites to read 5 articles per month before requiring a subscription. That number has now dropped to 2 articles per month.

This change only affects the BostonGlobe.com site. They still maintain their free Boston.com site, which contains less content.

Globe spokeswoman Ellen Clegg says, “We have been trying to find the right balance between the free-sharing culture of the Internet and paid access to premium Globe content.”

New York Times

The Paper of Record has knocked off one way of getting around its paywall. Visitors can no longer trim the URL to avoid triggering the pay warning. This was the easiest and most common method of avoidance, though several more still remain.

Spokesperson Eileen Murphy says that keeping these venues of free access open is a feature, not a bug:

When we launched our digital subscription plan we knew there were loopholes to access our content beyond the allotted number of articles each month. We have made some adjustments and will continue to make adjustments to optimize the gateway by implementing technical security solutions to prohibit abuse and protect the value of our content.

What Does It Mean?

Paywalls seem to be where the online news industry is heading, at least for now. These three papers have different methods of going about it:

• WashPo: Getting feedback on various payment plans before proceeding.
• Boston Globe: Offering a free option and a superior paid option with few leaks.
• NYT: Making the paywall leaky to get users acclimated before clamping down.

Opinions run strong on which method is best, or if paywalls are a viable long-term solution for monetizing online news. I think that DigitalFirst’s John Paton’s words of caution are appropriate for those of us on the outside. We should be humble in drawing our conclusions:

[E]motional arguments over what something is worth in a market economy is a near worthless waste of time at the expense of finding real solutions to the problem.

What other paywall strategies have you seen?

Filed under: news

Tags: boston globe, New York Times, paywalls, washington post