[cid:image001.gif@01CBB72F.92E15D20]<http://www.nytimes.com/>
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January 17, 2011
Under Pay Model, Little Effect Seen on Papers' Web Traffic
By JEREMY W. 
PETERS<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/jeremy_w_peters/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would 
happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers 
have started to emerge.
Steven Brill's Journalism Online<http://www.mypressplus.com/> experiment, which 
developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online 
visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that 
advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite 
predictions otherwise.
The sample size of Journalism Online's data was small - about two dozen mostly 
small- and medium-size papers that had been charging readers for several months 
- so divining any potential pattern for large newspapers is difficult.
But the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model 
by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read 
free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.
Journalism Online said monthly unique visits to the Web sites included in its 
study fell zero to 7 percent, while page views fell zero to 20 percent. No 
publishers reported a decline in advertising revenue.
Unlike a strict pay wall - which requires a subscription to view almost all 
editorial content - a model like the one Journalism Online employed does not 
choke off huge amounts of Web traffic.
"If you set this meter conservatively, which we urge people to do, it's a 
nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come to your Web site," Mr. 
Brill said.
Mr. Brill said most papers set a limit on the number of free articles readers 
could view from five to 20 each month. Papers charged a range of monthly 
subscription fees from around $3.95 to $10.95.
L. Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who is helping run 
the project, said one lesson to be taken from the numbers so far is that 
readers were willing to pay for some, but not all, content online. Consumers 
"will pay for the few news brands they really rely on, if they use them a lot," 
he said.
The newspapers using the Journalism Online venture were focused on local news 
and included The Columbus Dispatch in Mississippi and The York Daily Record in 
Pennsylvania.
With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, large American newspaper Web 
sites have so far remained free. The New York Times will become the largest 
American newspaper to employ a subscriber option for its Web site when it 
begins<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html> a system 
early this year to charge the heaviest users of NYTimes.com<http://NYTimes.com>.
Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer of Perfect Market, a news media consultant, 
said that what worked for small papers would not necessarily work for large 
papers. But he added that since no larger national papers have switched from 
free to partial pay, it was difficult to make any guesses. "How well that 
success will translate to larger sites depends on many things, including the 
quality, nature and exclusivity of content," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/media/18brill.html?_r=1&ref=media

________________________________

José A. López
Globomedia, Dpto. de Documentación-Comunicación
jalo...@globomedia.es<mailto:jalo...@globomedia.es>




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