A while back I wrote how newspapers just don’t get it when it comes to their internet product and their declining print readership. Now, I am not part of the something for nothing crowd. I believe businesses deserve to make a profit and people make as good a living as they can for the product and services they provide. If I pay for a newspaper from the stand, I must thumb page by page to get to the stories that interest me. Interspersed among those stories are the advertisements that make that paper possible. I get it! Not only do I understand that someone has to pay for the newspaper to provide me that information, but as an advertiser, I want to be one of those people (when appropriate for my clients) who places an ad in the newspaper.
The online edition of the paper however, is almost totally divorced from the print edition and has it’s own advertisements, which for most newspaper companies, does not even come close to paying for the bandwidth, let alone the content. Newspapers online make my task as a reader even easier than the print edition by allowing me to search for the news I want and not have to bother with everything else along the way.
Well, the publishing geniuses that control the newspaper empires have salivated for years over the success of the Wall Street Journal Online Edition and the paywall that keeps most stories out of the hands (or screens) of those who are not subscribers. It has been reported that major publishers from one coast to the other want to do the same thing. The New York Times wants to debut its paywall sometime next year. It will only end in disaster for them. I just read how the Times of London has lost 1.2 million viewers in the three months since they put the online paper behind a paywall. That’s 29 million pageviews lost. Those numbers will continue to decline because people can get their news almost anywhere….for free.
Why does the Wall Street Journal succeed where everyone else fails? The WSJ is niche publication focused almost entirely on the business community, where dozens of blogs, newspapers, radio stations and TV stations can report about the traffic on the interstate.
The solution is a very simple one. Newspapers and for that matter magazines (are you listening new owners of Newsweek?) should publish electronic editions of their actual publications for dissemination online at no charge. Who will pay for this? The advertisers whose ads are already in their print editions will pay the added bonus for the added eyeballs of all the online viewers who have to see their ads as placed in the publication. Consumers will get to see the newspaper or magazine in its entirety as well as all the ads they would see if they actually subscribed or picked up the publication at a news outlet.
The online edition as we know it now can then be put behind a paywall, with a large number of those ads eliminated and those who are willing to customize their stories and their searches can and will pay for that privilege.
