There's some good news from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the most famous general-interest paper to maintain a pay wall around its website and one that's holding up nicely in print -- its average weekday circulation increased 2.7% to 185,222 over the six months that ended in March, according to its new report with the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That includes 4,242 electronic editions, but paid print alone still increased 2.3%. And that's a large paper, although it's been charging since 2001, so readers are used to it.
The bad news is that last month Freedom Communications' Valley Morning Star in Harlingen, Tex., a paper with paid circulation approaching 20,000 copies, tore down the pay wall it just put up last July. Publisher Tyler Patton did not respond to calls seeking comment but was quoted on the reversal in a Valley Morning Star article: "While some readers and users gladly paid for our online content, providing free and unfiltered access to our website better complements our mission going forward."
However, the new round of newspaper-industry circulation reports last week suggest that pay walls at smaller papers, at least, often do help. They can help with print circulation, in particular, which is the venue for print ad revenue, still the most important revenue source for papers. And they can wring small but growing circulation revenue from the web.
Newspapers on the whole saw their average daily circulation for the six months ending in March fall 8.7% from the equivalent period a year earlier, according to publishers' reports recently released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. This is a smaller decline than in recent periods but still significant and pockmarked by double-digit declines at 10 of the country's top 25 papers.
Smaller papers did better, pay walls or not. Newspapers with circulations above 50,000 averaged a 9.4% decline, while papers with circulations under 25,000 averaged a 6.5% decline, according to an analysis by the audit bureau.
But most smallish papers with relatively established pay walls reported better numbers still.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interesting post. I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.
ReplyDeleteAs a sidenote, it's quite similar (actually word-for-word) to an Ad Age article written by Nat Ives on May 3, 2010:
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=143637
Do you suppose he stole your material before you posted it here?
If so, you should contact him and tell him to stop plagiarizing your work.
I think news business is about to change in a very radical way. Before Internet it was a very controlled business by just a few players; now it is developed by an every much larger players which allow a much larger access to information than before. But I still don't know if this availability in quantity also translates in availability of quality and accuracy. Personally, I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteI think this soft spot is the one small papers can seize and by mean of better quality service can be translate it in profits by charging for this service.
Big papers as NYT are having troubles developing this revenue model, so I think small papers will suffer more to actually develop this model, but if they manage to do it, will develop a new market opportunity.