Newsday Gets 35 Subscriptions To Pay Web Site 177
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the now-thats-lucrative dept.
from the now-thats-lucrative dept.
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."
Abomination? (Score:3, Interesting)
In October, the web site relaunched and was redesigned. One of the principals behind the redesign is Mr. Mancini's replacement, editor Debby Krenek.
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.
W3C agrees [w3.org].
Does anyone have a before and after screen shot? Honestly, the site [newsday.com] doesn't look half bad. Reduce/condense the amount of information you're throwing on the frontpage and you've got a good site. I don't even see an unnecessarily egregious use of Flash that mars so many news sites. It's a hell of a lot better than 75% of the news sites I come across (even Reuters has this annoying script that runs endlessly). I should note that with my bandwidth here it loaded pretty much instantly. I could see this taking forever on ma and pa's dialup.
strange numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
Not as bad as it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
If you read the article (I know, I know) you'll discover that 75% of the people in the region already have access to the site via package deals:
So it's actually surprising that 35 people did sign up for it. I'm guessing they are people that moved from Long Island to other places and, for whatever reason, miss reading Newsday. I know it's popular to scream that newspapers are dying, but this is not really a story that supports that supposition.
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is similar to the experience they had over at Salon. This was one of my favorite places to get news until they put up a pay wall, and in December they talked about how it hard hurt their traffic.
This is a great read, for people who actually care about the discussion of pay walls vs free.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/dec/03/memories-paywall-pioneer [guardian.co.uk]
It "worked" for us in that it provided some revenue for Salon to survive through the leanest period of its existence. (We'd already completed the latest of three rounds of layoffs, and the entire staff took pay cuts, three weeks before 9/11.) But within a few months, as advertisers began dipping their toes back in the water and the influx of new subscribers who'd flocked to help us out in a crisis dwindled, we could see that the subscription model didn't provide much room for growth. So we tried something new: we put up an ad over the front door of the site. Subscribers wouldn't see it at all; other readers had to watch a 30-second video ad, then they got a "day pass."
The day pass approach was beloved by the advertisers and hated by many, though not all, readers. More important, by this point the public was, understandably, thoroughly confused about how to get to read Salon content. It took many years for our traffic to begin to grow again. Paywalls are psychological as much as navigational, and it's a lot easier to put them up than to take them down. Once web users get it in their head that your site is "closed" to them, if you ever change your mind and want them to come back, it's extremely difficult to get that word out.
This just in... (Score:4, Interesting)
newspapers are dead....
People who have their local paper delivered to their door every morning by a real life 'person' tend to pay $5 or less a week so why is the online site so expensive?..
Re:Ha! (Score:5, Interesting)
There are many things like this where you can alienate of confuse your customer base so much that you simply doom any chance to rollback to your previous state.
There was a wonderful "dollar" theater around here. It wasn't really all that big but it was well liked and got a fair amount of business. One day for whatever reason, they changed to become a full-fledged cinema. It seems they thought their volume would justify switching.
Well... one-by-one all their customers found out they were charging full-fare and running the latest films. And one-by-one, these folk scratched this theater off their lists. If someone was seeking a dollar theater, this was no longer one of those. If someone wanted to pay full-rate, this theater couldn't hope to compare with the major cineplexes. But when I mean folk nixed it, I mean completely. Everyone just moved on and forgot about it.
They vainly attempted to change back to a dollar theater. But they had no more customer base. Hardly any at all. They closed shop entirely soon after that.
The Internet and Web is a vastly larger marketplace than the neighborhood movie market. It would seem far easier for people to find what you're pushing somewhere else.
Newpapers Have to Deliver Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Read a regular newpaper story in an area where you're an expert. Notice how sloppy they are? How careless with the facts? People have complained about this for ages, but there wasn't much you could do about it. Most communities only had one or two papers to choose from.
Today, though, there's a huge market in online news, and, for the most part, the market seems to have set the price at "free." (That's free as in beer, of course.) It is difficult for me to believe that the market has got the price wrong. (Again, with a few exceptions.)
--Greg
Re:Newpapers Have to Deliver Quality (Score:3, Interesting)
The Economist doesn't anymore - I'm a subscriber, but I haven't bothered to tell the website that because it doesn't seem to matter. Except recently they've been putting little popup "Become a Subscriber" ads, so I might register just to make those go away.
I don't know anything about Newsday, but I do think there may be a niche for ultra local newspapers; they can give stuff that the big news sources can't - parades, school sports, local government issues, zoning etc. For an example see http://gazette.net/ [gazette.net] - they break MD down to the community level, and still seem to be doing ok.
I'll pay for the news (Score:4, Interesting)
Give me investigative journalism that is reasonably unbiased and you have a lifetime subscriber.
Give me right or left slanted takes on a WH press release or random blogger's "news story" and you're worse than useless to me.
What's the solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's obvious that the current situation is fragile and the media is changing, but what's the solution?
To recap:
So how can the newspapers provide content and pay for the bills?
It's easy to dismiss the media as being obsolete and that you can find the information for free anyway, but let's consider something: almost all bloggers and "new media" hipsters get the info from the old media anyway. There's precious little actual content created by bloggers and enthusiasts and it's very difficult to do so.
Case in point, I researched for weeks on info about the software used in the making of Avatar [twin-pixels.com] and some technical details [twin-pixels.com]. I got the info by finding the companies involved via IMDB, talking to people involved and basically scrapping bits and pieces into a coherent article. Then Cinefex magazine [cinefex.com] came out with so much more information, all my work looks ridiculous.
For giggles, mostly (Score:3, Interesting)
I just subscribed to Newsday.com. I'm Customer36. That's my username. I'm going to be blogging about my adventures with one of the worst ideas for a paywall ever.
Fun fact: Newsday doesn't ask for your credit card when you subscribe. They call you later. Must not have anticipated much demand.
http://shortformblog.com/biz/our-adventures-as-newsday-customer-no-36-the-subscription [shortformblog.com]
Re:Ha! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Ha! (Score:2, Interesting)
Their reporters don't make things up NYT style? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't believe it.
The New York Times is completely disreputable; granted.
But so is the whole Journalist profession.
Re:I'll pay for the news (Score:3, Interesting)