Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions To Pay Web Site 177
Hugh Pickens writes "In late October, Newsday put its web site behind a pay wall, one of the first non-business newspapers to take the pay wall plunge, so Newsday has been followed with interest in media circles anxious to learn how the NY Times own plans to put up a pay wall may work out. So how successful has Newsday's paywall been? The NY Observer reports that three months into the experiment only 35 people have signed up to pay $5 a week to get unfettered access to newsday.com. Newsday's web site redesign and relaunch reportedly cost about $4 million and the 35 people who've signed up have earned Newsday about $9,000. Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic. 'That's 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,' said Jimenez to his assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday employees. The web project has not been a favorite among Newsday employees who have recently been asked to take a 10 percent pay cut. 'The view of the newsroom is the web site sucks,' says one staffer. 'It's an abomination,' adds another."
Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha! Take that long standing respectable media. Funny, I'd bet they'd be better off without a website at all. Now there is a way to fix this, though I'm interested in feedback before I try to do anything about it. What we need is a micro-payment aggregation service combined with an advertisement blocking proxy server. Opera is doing the rebuilding on the fly for smaller and faster page loads, and if they combined that with an ad-blocking service for $10/yr and had a "$.02" payment button that sites like Newsday could contract for, then everybody would win.
Nobody is going to pay for news (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is going to pay for a news site for the most part. You can easily get the same news elsewhere for free. The only places I've seen people pay for something like this is cable TV. The reason for that is because you had too to get all the major content.
The reason you can't do that with websites is that any old Joe can't create a TV station, but they can create a news website. If Newssite1.com makes you pay, everyone will go to Newssite2.com to get the same information free.
For the record, (Score:5, Insightful)
For the record, they sell access to the web site for $5 per week, while they sell the paper for $4.50 including access to the web site. Basically those 35 subscribers are paying 50 cents per day to not get the paper delivered. They also give free access to all people who subscribe to the local cable provider -- which is a lot of people for the local paper.
Plus it's Newsday.....
Re:Abomination? (Score:1, Insightful)
The information is lost in a colour heavy design, using what looks suspiciously like a stock template. How this cost $4million I'd love to know.
The design and funnel was conducted clearly by someone with no experience in subscription sites - getting someone to pull out their credit card is a lot harder than just blocking full access - the prejoin page is a mess, and it's not clear with a 5 second page read, let alone a glance, what the options are. If it takes 5 seconds you've lost most people.
What they need is a clean site, black on white, with a clear uncluttered explanatory presign page - heck a 'letter from the editor' is probably a good idea at this time - and considerably more visible information and _news_ on the front page.
I design and manage Adult paysites, but the principles are essentially the same - particularly the 5-second rule.
"Free Online Newspaper With Your HBO" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how I have heard this categorized here in the NY area. See, if you are a Cablevision/Optimum Online sub, you get Newsday Online for free. "That's a $260 Value -- If You Sign Before Midnight Tonight!"
Remember, Newsday is owned by The Dolans, the certifiably insane family that also owns and/or operates Madison Square Garden, the Knicks, the Rangers, the Liberty, Clearview Cinemas, the Beacon Theater, Radio Friggin' Music Hall, and prolly my toaster oven as well, haven't checked lately. This isn't about love or money for the newspaper, this is about things like "synergies" and "paradigms" and "leverage." These are the kind of robber baron sociopaths who would burn an orphanage they own to the ground if the price of diapers got higher than they had budgeted, or they needed to light a lot of their cigars at once and they only had one match left.
Re:Not as bad as it sounds (Score:2, Insightful)
So the potential regional market is only 1/4 the size that it otherwise might have been? Think, without these other access deals, they might have gotten 140 people to sign up.
Re:Abomination? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd pay .... only if there were no free sites (Score:3, Insightful)
Before making a website pay-only, the producer really has to ask: what's the market?, not "what's this service worth? So long as the rest of the market requires no payment, there's not a hope in hell of getting any significant customer base. The only chance you might, possibly, have is to somehow change the market you're in. Going from a news service - of which there are many: all the same, to an analysis or insider site might just do it, but I doubt that many people would recognise the distinction.
As it is, this site has got one very valuable asset that few other websites have: a list of people willing to pay good money for something that everyone else gets for free. That's gotta be worth a fortune.
Re:Article glosses over an important fact (Score:2, Insightful)
Whaaaaat? (Score:3, Insightful)
Still publisher Terry Jimenez is unapologetic.
I submit that publisher Terry Jimenez has less business saavy than a 10-pound bag of fertilizer.
Re:Ha! (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that newpapers are completely dead, the body simply has not stopped moving.
I can get my news HOURS after it has happened or get it from my various RSS feeds seconds to minutes afterwards. Plus I get to filter it to have only what I want.
Short of puppy training, wrapping dishes, and for poop paper for a bird cage, a newspaper has ZERO value. Even web based they are slow to react and usually are only repeating what I have already read from the various feeds I have.
There is no way to save the newspaper business. Ebooks might if the media companies get off their asses and not only publish a daily release but also update it's contents every 15 minutes.
They want how much? (Score:5, Insightful)
$260 a year for access to a B-list newspaper site? Really? The Wall Street Journal online only is $110/year ant they're The Wall Street Journal.
Good luck.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
And furthermore, it's actually less expensive to buy a Newsday print subscription than it is to get just the electronic access, so the article could really be rephrased as "Thirty-five people pay extra to not get a real newspaper."
Re:Nobody is going to pay for news (Score:4, Insightful)
And to continue this point, it's not just the "free" aspect, it's also the ability to go directly to the source for the information.
... because I can.
Back in the day, actually not too long ago, the news outlets (papers, radio, TV) served a purpose - they provided a conduit for information transfer. Folks had information (big game scores, courtroom shenanignas, weather forecasts) and needed a way to convey that information to other folks. Similarly, the "end users" desired the information, but didn't have a way to get it directly. The news media connected the two groups, and served a valuable purpose.
Enter the Intarweb. Suddenly, the end user is directly connected to the information source. The news media middlemen are left holding their hats, scrambling for significance.
Probably the worst thing that has happened to the media outlets is transparency. When you have the web at yor fingertips, it's particularly easy to notice that the vast majority of news outlets are simply re-branding the AP or Reuters news feeds. Their collective credibility is shot to hell. They've been branded as "middle men" and not as information sources. The web allows you to go directly to the source. Why would I tolerate some reporter's re-hash of a story when I can interpret the source for myself? Case and point - I can get weather information directly from the National Weather Service [noaa.gov] rather than getting the dumbed-down version spewed by the local TV station or newspaper. They don't add value (actually they remove it) so I bypass them
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think a newspaper has to be entirely irrelevant. There's little news so vital to me that I can't wait a few hours to hear it, one area traditional media could compete is quality. Well-written, thought-out articles with fact checking (remember that?) would be a value proposition that many of the internet sources, with their rush to be first to publish couldn't afford. If you're not going to print for several hours, use that time to make what you print much better than everyone else and I would happily consume your product because I only have to read it once, not read countless rumours, counter-claims, retractions, etc.
Unfortunately this type of quality reporting was dead even before the internet came along. There just wasn't a suitable alternative at the time to eat their lunch, the 'net just happened to be the first one that came along and fit the bill. The internet didn't kill traditional newspapers, they committed suicide a long time ago.
Re:Article glosses over an important fact (Score:1, Insightful)
All well and good, but if they are spending $9mil on a website that is only going to be accessible to people who are ALREADY paying for their articles via the printed paper....what's the point?
Oh I don't know, something crazy like attempting to increase the value of their service to their customers (by this I mean the attempt to redesign their website, not specifically the paywall). But who cares about things like improving your product these days?
They just spent $9mil to allow their current readers to read the same articles online as well. Excellent business model.
FYI the "fine" summary stated $4 million, not $9 million. Yet what's 5 million dollars between friends, right pal? Anyway, even if the redesigned website allows them to better retain their current customers or add new ones (for the actual print addition or for the parent company's other subscription services) it can be worth it in the long run. IMHO the only totally boneheaded part of their change was implementing the paywall.
They were obviously expecting to make revenue from the paywall, but instead they are proving that the paywall model does not work well. Granted a paper with a larger circulation would have more paywall subscribers by default, but if the percentages remained similar it would still not be worth the investment. It will be interesting to see how larger news sites respond to this.
Now this part I agree with. They apparently thought that a significant portion of the people that use their website but aren't their local customers, or subscribers to Cablevision, would bother with the paywall. However, unless they only had 100 or so non-subscriber visitors (possible but unlikely), it hasn't panned-out that way. So it will be interesting to see what lessons, if any the "big guys" take away from this episode.
Re:Abomination? (Score:2, Insightful)
Backup, servers, and bandwidth all require manpower to keep them operational. I take it *you* don't work in the IT industry.
And the performance question is separate from the "do I like how this looks question," which is what everyone looks at when asking if this site was worth 4 million. Whatever that money went into, most of it was probably not UI design, and this is natural and understandable for a site of that size.