As a native Long Islander, I was amused when Newsday, our local paper, waded fearlessly and without irony into the ice-cold waters of charging for news on the internet.

I don’t know anyone who has ever paid for a physical copy of Newsday. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure I thought they were passed out free on the Long Island Railroad until I was about eighteen. Even in high school, in a year full of stoners, everyone was totally too good for Newsday and favored the New York Times when they could afford it. Still, Newsday felt they would be able to charge for access to their poorly designed and annoying to navigating site, done in dark blue with white print- and not at a bargain rate, either.

Back in October, Newsday decided to charge $5 a week (a week!), or $260 a year for access to news about the Hamptons and Massapequa. And how many people do you think availed themselves of that fantastic offer? 10,000? 1,000? 100? Try 35. Not 35,000, 3,500 or 350. 35 people were interested in paying for access to Newsday content. That’s like, not even half of a single car on a rush hour train from Babylon to Penn Station. Fail.

In fairness to Newsday, a large portion of Long Island has access to the paper without having to pay the online fee. 75% of Long Islanders have either a subscription to Newsday itself, or subscribe to Cablevision/Optimum and are comped access to the site. But that figure of 75% has not been broken down into paper subscribers versus those who get freebies with cable, and most telling is the fact that traffic has dropped significantly since the paywall went up:

According to Nielsen Online, traffic has fallen since the paywall went up. In October, the web site had 2.2 million unique users. After the paywall went up that total fell to 1.7 million and 1.5 million in November and December, respectively.

While I like to mock the very public failure of my very local newspaper, the numbers are a cautionary tale to others who think a pay-for access model (and a ballsy one at that) is going to work any differently in this market. Newsday will continue to hemorrhage funds (the site redesign ahead of the paywall cost $4m) until they realize no one on the internet is going to pay for content they can get for free elsewhere. Unless you’ve got something very unique with a completely dedicated base of readers, it will fail. Spectacularly.

[Observer via Gawker]

So, Newsday, how’s that paywall working out for you? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Clark Hoyt, the public editor over at the New York Times web site published an article on Saturday, June 20 that I’m having a few problems with. Well, I guess using the word ‘article’ would be a bit of a stretch, since it’s just an unbalanced advertorial that is not clearly marked as an ad.

At the beginning of the article, Hoyt pulls no punches. He talks of how the newsstand price of the NYT went up significantly while the size of the paper and some of it’s coverage decreased. He quotes concerned readers showing their dismay at the publication’s pay-more-for-less changes, then goes on to reassure readers that this is a good thing, that quality will actually increase and that readers will get used to it.

Then comes the current financial situation facing all newspapers and how the last uncharged-for content is fully accessable online to anyone with a web enabled device. That’s where they will turn to next. Hey, if people are going online and reading the NYT for free, we want their money and we’ll put up a paywall to get it.

And, you’ll be getting prime online multimedia content because they’ve had to hire and train an army of videographers who’ll have tons of the latest news up, that you’ll only be able to see online, after paying.

But Hoyt does it with finesse. He can write, I’ll give him that.

Page 2 is where he drops the real bomb, though, with this:

Times executives are studying possible ways to charge readers for online content, an increasing focus in the industry as the world moves to the Web.

Which, if you noticed, drops the bomb first and cleans up after it in the second part of the same sentence by trying to justify the price increase. Everybody else is doing it so we are too.

He then spends the rest of the article using the classic sales copy tactic of having everyday readers just like you sell the new price increases with testimonials, conveniently filling in information between them to put the story in perspective.

NYT readers, they’re going to be charging you for online content, because everyone else is doing it, and you’re going to like it, because everyone else likes it.

The article is just too much. It’s thinly veiled advertising that should be marked as such. In fact, the only things that differentiate it from one of those direct marketing minisite letters is that it doesn’t have a huge red headline, or a big BUY NOW! button at the end… yet.

NYT Grooms Readers for Impending Paywall, with Unmarked Advertorials is a post from: The Inquisitr