Can online pay walls boost print sales?
Usually the argument for a newspaper placing up a paywall centers on the idea that users will value the content enough to pay for its online distribution. But when an Arkansas newspaper placed a pay wall up on its own site, it didn’t necessarily care that the wall didn’t produce much revenue:
The economic argument in favor of online paid content is not necessarily in the revenue it can generate on its own, Walter Hussman said Thursday afternoon, but it is in the way paid content can help keep a newspaper’s print circulation up. …
…Hussman said the paid content online generates just one-tenth of 1 percent (0.1 percent) of the newspaper’s total revenue. But the newspaper has been very successful in keeping print circulation up in part because the newspaper is not giving all its content away for free. The Democrat-Gazette’s daily circulation is up 3,000 to more than 176,000 over the past 10 years, while other newspapers in the Southeast are down (some significantly). Sunday circulation for the Democrat-Gazette is down just 1 percent in 10 years.
I’m not sure I buy this argument. The net-savvy aren’t necessarily going to subscribe. Even if my local daily shut its website down completely, I wouldn’t subscribe. I only pick up a copy of the local daily if I need rabbit-cage lining or catfish-wrapper.
The decline in newspapers across the southeast has a lot more to do with a general decline in the quality of content, IMHO. I know plenty of people who no longer subscribe the the local daily but don’t even own a computer.
I think perhaps it’s a short term strategy. It might slow down a decline but then that means that the paper isn’t working to adapt for when the strategy stops working. By putting up the paywall, they’re simply creating a larger marketplace for local online eyeballs, seems only natural that other bloggers and news sites will rush into fill that void.
[...] in July I posted about a claim from an Arkansas newspaper that even though its paywall didn’t produce much direct revenue, [...]