Paywalls are Going Up at Gannett. How Does That Help?

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What an advertising world we live in.  Twitter and Facebook are awash in consumers spreading the word about local news, sports, products and themselves for free.  Printed newspapers are consistently losing readership, subscriptions and ad revenue, so now newspapers must charge for their online content.

Several days ago Gannett Publishing announced that they will start charging for online content for 80 of their newspapers but not charge for USA Today online.

Gannett hopes this will bring in $100 million in new revenue from these charges  but doesn’t make a calculation as how these charges will impact online advertising revenue, that may go down if online readership goes down.

I for one, cancelled my print edition several years ago and I don’t miss it because my local paper has a great website that updates all day long.

While I use Twitter and Facebook, they are a long way from organizing their data in such a way that I would be confident I’m getting all of the local news I need.  So, I’m willing to pay a modest fee to my local paper to access local information online.

However, if I’m a local retailer nothing changes, I will spend my advertising effort on social media first, because it is so popular and free of publication costs.  Then I will look at other free-of-publication-costs online options such as directories.  Then search, then banner ads and finally I will consider newspaper print advertising.

Paywalls might work for getting income from readers but when so much else is free online for a retailer, the real problem for newspapers continues on, ad revenue will drop faster than online subscriptions will go up.

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