That is to say, you get to read a limited number of stories per month and if you want to view more than that, you have to pay. Specifies for the Charlotte Observer are yet to be announced.
Surprised by McClatchy’s move? You shouldn’t be. The limited-free-then-you-pay model is all the rage for newspaper websites. Among the state’s big papers, the Fayetteville Observer, Winston-Salem Journal, and Asheville Citizen-Times have already adopted it. The Greensboro News & Record restricts most of its local content to subscribers only.
Whether what the New York Times and all these other papers are doing makes sense is a different question. The move will certainly reduce the number of people who look at their content. Whether the additional subscribers they get more than offsets the loss in advertising revenue from fewer page views remains to be seen.
28
2012 At 9:34 pm, clayj Said:
ANY barrier they raise is going to hurt them:
1. They’re going to lose readers who don’t want to pay for something they can get elsewhere for free.
2. They’re going to lose advertisers who don’t want to pay to advertise in what will now be a more limited arena.
3. They’re going to have to lower their ad rates for the remaining advertisers, because of the reduced traffic.
It defies logic that the new revenue they’ll collect from readers who are actually WILLING to pay will somehow exceed their losses in the areas I listed above.
And it’s fair to say that those readers may demand an end to advertising, since they’re paying for the content. TV broadcast networks here in the US don’t charge you to watch their content, since they’re making their money off ads. But networks like the BBC, which force viewers to pay (through an annual TV license fee), do NOT run ads because everything’s paid for. If the CO is forced by its readership to drop all ads behind the paywall, their revenue stream will be reduced to nothing.
28
2012 At 9:43 pm, rancline Said:
While some “A-List” newspapers and periodicals may be able to make this work, the fishwrap of Charlotte, for rank and file readers will never generate any revenue for them. Thank you Observer and McClatchy… it’s been nice knowing you.
28
2012 At 9:51 pm, clayj Said:
One question I am wondering about: How exactly are they going to track how many pages you’ve viewed? If they do it based on IP addresses, then that’s going to cause a BIG problem with people accessing the CO from computers inside large corporations (Bank of America, for example) — you might have a thousand or more desktop PCs all accessing the Internet from ONE external IP address. If everyone there tried to access the CO, then they’d quickly find themselves being asked for money. It’s possible that the CO could try to accommodate this by setting different page access limits for specific IP addresses, but that’s a lot of IT work and I don’t think the CO’s meager IT staff is up to that. Does the CO *really* want to make it difficult for workers at large Charlotte corporations to access their site?
So what, then? Cookies? Easy enough to prevent a web site from storing cookies on your PC — and thereby prevent their system from ever really knowing how many pages you’ve accessed.
The WSJ’s paywall works differently — there is content outside the paywall which can be accessed without limit, and there is content INSIDE the paywall which requires that you have a username and password to access. There’s no attempt to track page views or anything else like that — there is free and there is paid and never the twain shall meet.
I think this proposed McClatchy plan is half-baked (and the people there are COMPLETELY baked) and this is gonna blow up in their faces before it drags the entire ship to the bottom of the sea.
28
2012 At 10:34 pm, Michael Lowrey Said:
clayj,
Most of newspaper paywalls are (intentionally) leaky to one degree or another, including the Wall Street Journal. Here’s an article on the NYT’s paywall: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/that-was-quick-four-lines-of-code-is-all-it-takes-for-the-new-york-times-paywall-to-come-tumbling-down-2/
No idea what exactly McClatchy will do, but as stated lots of other newspapers are doing this, including many much smaller than the CO. The limit-number-of-views-a-month paywalls are annoying though. My JLF responsibilities include finding the headlines for Carolina Journal Online and local headlines for all the JLF regional blogs. JLF pays for a Winston-Salem and Asheville web subscription for me.
Fayetteville’s paywall is high enough (20 per month), their news of state interest is somewhat uncommon, and we don’t have a regional blog covering that area, so I make do without a subscription. I can say that the big problem with rationing your views is that you don’t know what their definition of a month is (past 30 days, calender month?) or how many stories you’ve looked at over that period. (They do give a warning at 15.) The other thing is that all stories, regardless of length, count equally against that limit.
At least the Fayetteville paper gives you 20 free a month. IIRC the Hickory Daily Record gives you five free a month, which is so low that it kills my desire to even look there for any news at all.
30
2012 At 10:45 am, Skyler the Weird Said:
You know they could pass a law requiring you to buy the observer as a well informed public (snicker)is essential to the good of the Republic. Just pay a tax if you choose not to buy the Paper.