Statistical, Ecosystems and Competitiveness Analysis of the Media and Content Industries: The Newspaper Publishing Industry

3.3.2 
Paying for online and mobile news offerings 
Due to the abundance of news and information available online people have so far showed 
little willingness to pay for online news. Early efforts to have people pay for online news 
articles or archive services have largely failed, with some notable exceptions for specialised 
and niche content. For instance the Financial Times is one of the few online newspapers 
which has succeeded in developing a profitable online service. Currently, visitors who register 
can view up to ten articles for free and are subsequently invited to pay for the newspaper’s 
online content, if they want to read more than just the headlines.
Despite early failures, the search for feasible and viable pay models continues. At the end of 
2010 and the beginning of 2011, several news publishers relaunched paywalls and 

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The Newspaper Publishing Industry 
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subscription plans to their websites (WAN IFRA, 2011).
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At the beginning of 2011 the New 
York Times, for instance, introduced a digital subscription plan. Readers who visit the New 
York Times website are allowed to access twenty articles per calendar month for free. To gain 
access to more online content and to receive the New York Times mobile app, people need to 
pay a fee. Subscription plans start at 3.75 USD a week.
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The New York Times estimated that 
approximately 15% of its visitors would run into their paywall. In Europe, newspapers also 
have launched paywalls. Examples are The Berliner Morgenpost, the Hamburger Abendblatt 
and Le Figaro (Foremski, 2010; Lunden, 2010) as well as Murdoch’s News International UK 
titles The Sun, News of the World, The Times and the Sunday Times (Lloyd, 2010). Early 
figures on the amount of online subscribers are modestly positive for the New York Times but 
less so for other newspapers that have introduced paywalls. Digital subscriptions to the 
nytimes.com went up from zero to 224,000 customers in three months; 57,000 iPad and 
Kindle users joined and 750,000 print subscribers registered for online access (Preston, 2011). 
At the same time, and contrary to expectations, advertising revenues rose as well. Figures for 
the online edition of the Times in the UK are however, much less positive (Preston, 2011).
The introduction of tablet computers such as the iPad (in 2010) brought new promises for 
paid newspaper services. In 2011, News Corp. launched an iPad-only newspaper; The Daily. 
There are also examples of newspaper publishers offering a combination of a print 
subscription and a digital iPad version of the newspaper for reduced prices for use in 
households where more than one person wants to read the newspaper (e.g. NRC Handelsblad, 
a Dutch quality newspaper). Since 2010, Apple has been negotiating with publishers to enable 
the sale of newspaper and magazine subscriptions via the iTunes store for consumption on the 
iPad (Rabil, Satariano, & Burrows, 2010). In February 2011, publishers reportedly closed 
deals with Apple. Publishers can sell subscriptions through the iTunes store, but must grant 
Apple 30% of their revenues (Pompeo, 2011). When a reader buys a subscription with a credit 
card via the iTunes store, Apple does not need to share the personal details of the subscriber 
with the newspaper publisher. In this way publishers miss out on valuable user data on their 
readers (Grueskin, Seave, & Graves, 2011). But apparently, so far, newspaper publishers are 
not in a position to make better deals and benefit from the secure and reliable sales 
mechanisms of the iTunes store and of the attractiveness and ease-of-use of iPads, which has 
made newspaper reading on computers a relative success for the first time.
Another experimental model is one where online news providers offer their users 
subscriptions to a selection of news and other content from different news sources. Users can 
make their own selections and pay a fee based on the number of articles, categories or sources 
they have chosen (see, for instance, eLinea
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). Instead of buying a full newspaper or 
magazine, subscribers can select for instance the foreign news articles from the newspaper 
famous for its foreign news reporting and the book reviews from a newspaper which has high 
quality cultural sections. This model depends on the willingness of news publishers to 
cooperate with the new service providers and/or their ability to cooperate and develop such 
models amongst themselves. Pulse, Zite, Flipboard and others offer similar services, but the 
first three so far do not yet charge users. 
Although it is too early for a thorough analysis of the success or failure of these paywalls and 
other pay models for online news, they already evoke much discussion. The strategic 
problems with paywalls are threefold (Reichenstein, 2011). First, paywalls do not protect all 
content. As there is no information shortage online, users might decide to get their 
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It must be noted that the Wall Street Journal had already implemented a paywall in 1996.
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See for more detailed information:
http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp5558.html?campaignid=37XQH
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www.elinea.nl

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