DRM News

Not sure what a ‘paywall’ is? Its when an internet site hides its content behind subscription services. In other words, paying for access. Back in November News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch said he wants to put all of News Corp’s sites behind a paywall, even going so far as to block his sites from Google searches.

“We’d rather have fewer people coming to our websites, but paying.” he said.

Well one large newspaper did just that, and Mr. Murdoch should pay attention. Three months ago Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, went behind a paywall after a $4 million dollar redesign. How many subscriptions do they have in that 3 months? Thirty Five, yes you read that right 35. At $5 per week, those 35 people are going to be able to pay off that $4 million investment in approximately 439.5 years. Now don’t quote me on this, but somehow I don’t think those 35 people are going to be keeping those subscriptions that long.

The New York Observer quotes some staff thoughts about the new web site.

To say the least, the project has not been a newsroom favorite. "The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks," said one staffer.

"It’s an abomination," said another.

Traffic to the web site has dropped about 50%, which means they aren’t even getting the ad revenue they were a few months ago.

Now my local paper has done exactly the same thing. A paper I used to pick up on occasion, and I used to visit the site fairly frequently. It was a good source of local goings on, plus it had the employment section where I could look for work. The classified section is actually the only part not behind the paywall. I have not subscribed and I’m only on the site long enough to look and see if there are any more jobs up, once a week. I don’t even look at the headlines of stories. Why bother? I wonder how their web traffic is doing?

This isn’t just newspapers making this change. Hulu.com is also considering going behind the paywall. I think this is doomed to failure just like Newsday. The reason? There are tons of other sites you can go to for exactly the same thing for free.

(update) Techdirt reports a Guardian Editor Details Why Paywalls Harm Journalism. An interesting read.