Paid Online News Venture Fails To Get Subscribers

Ian Lamont writes "The idea of migrating people from free online news content to paid subscriptions has been dealt a blow. A venture meant to fill the void left by the print Rocky Mountain Times has attracted 3,000 subscribers — just 6% of its original goal of reaching 50,000 paid subscribers by Thursday. InDenverTimes.com is currently free, but the plan was to have gated premium content starting next month for a $5/month subscription. The project has entrepreneurial backing and articles from journalists who used to work for the print-focused Rocky Mountain News, which closed last month. However, a lack of paying subscribers and low online ad rates means that the venture might have to scale back its ambitions."

Not the Times

[Laser_47]

It was the Rocky Mountain News that shut down...

Same here

[SuperKendall]

I also had not heard of it at all, and I live in Denver also...

Although once in the web arena, I'm not sure how well a newspaper based web site can do against the news station web sites.

Re:duh indeed.

[zonky]

Free to Air TV is the perfect example of a monopoly business model where there is an artifical constraint (Limited Frequency Allocation) on the number of entrants to the market. Where digital TV, etc has increased the number of players, revenue/earnings has dropped signficantly.