Near the one year anniversary of The New York Times paywall implementation, The Times has announced they will continue the paywall and limit the number of free articles to 10 from the previous level of 20 per month. This sounds like good news for The New York Times and may be good news for other papers.
We’ve noted many times how newspaper advertising revenue has been dropping dramatically for the last several years and they need help. While no one thinks that a paywall can replace the drop in print advertising revenue, every little bit helps.
The Times claims 454,000 paid digital subscribers and that gives them the confidence to continue with the program and even make it more restrictive.
Now, will other newspapers follow and will paywalls be the saving income stream for newsapers? Gannet has already announced that they will have paywalls in place for most of their papers by the end of this year.
Smaller newspapers have to be watching this very closely and soon we will see local papers experimenting with paywalls.
I for one, think paywalls will work and we will all have to pay to read the local newspaper’s site. Most local newspapers simply do a much better job of gathering news than any other entity in town. Much better than radio and TV stations.
However, this may hurt the print editions even more. If I’m paying for online, I’m not going to pay extra for a print edition. In fact, I cancelled my local paper print subscription years ago and really enjoy the free online access to even more information than what’s in the print edition.
As a marketer interested in how local advertising is changing, the decline in print readership will continue no matter what happens with paywalls. So, too should the shift from relying on local print advertising to local digital advertising. Nothing is going to stop that.