More evidence that charging for online content boosts newspaper print sales?
Back in July I posted about a claim from an Arkansas newspaper that even though its paywall didn’t produce much direct revenue, it resulted in a higher print circulation.
Today we have this piece reporting that the Newport Daily News’ newsstand sales jumped by 200 copies a day after it put its content behind a paywall
But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph. “The fact that weather hasn’t been fantastic makes me believe that the pay wall has had an effect,” Lucey says. “We think that more people are buying the paper now that they can’t get it for free online.”
