The paper’s growth in digital subscriptions was done not through restricting access but by “targeting different kinds of readers on Facebook, giving registered readers a lighter ad experience and increasing its service journalism,” the story notes.Īnd while now has a hard paywall, it also operates a second free website, Boston,com, which “has a separate newsroom covering similar topics, but more in a lifestyle, things-to-do, community-focused way,” as Peter Doucette, the Globe’s Chief Consumer Revenue Officer, told CJR. Stanley points to the Globe and the Minneapolis Star Tribune as two models of regional papers that are “sustaining their newsrooms despite the decline in advertising revenue by building the next generation of subscribers around their digital and mobile sites.”īut the Star Tribune hasn’t had a hard paywall, though it began to “test restricted access to certain content to registered visitors” last year, as Digiday reports. The other exception, CJR noted, was the Boston Globe, which created a hard paywall in Spring 2017, the toughest of the 25 papers analyzed: “Non-subscribers get two metered articles per month, and that’s it,” the story noted. The grand exception had been the Wall Street Journal, which always had a very hard paywall, but in 2016 began to offer some limited opportunities to sneak into content. A Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) analysis in September 2017 found that of the nation’s top 25 newspapers, 10 offered free access for readers, and most of the rest offered a “leaky paywall”, often putting up a barrier after so many stories were viewed. This sounds like a pretty hard paywall, which most papers have avoided. So how has that approach worked for the Journal Sentinel? On the one hand Stanley suggests it’s a success: “our paid digital subscriptions have grown by 170% in the last two years,” he writes.īut if that’s so, why the radical change? Stanley says “a significant portion of our reporting will be available only to subscribers” and “will be labeled ‘For Subscribers’ on JSOnline and our mobile apps.” And most of the time, you click away…You don’t need an MBA to realize that it’s less than ideal for your customers to feel disgusted by you immediately before you ask them for money.” A strange mix of indignity and disgust washes over you. You start to engage with an interesting story, then you’re slapped with a pop-up…. The consumer psychology underlying this was far from ideal, as writer Bob Howard of Quartz noted: “Take a moment to consider the emotions you feel every time you hit one of these barriers. The Times created what became a popular solution: a metered paywall that cut off readers after they had clicked on a certain number of stories per month and informed them they need to subscribe to see more. That’s impressive, considering Milwaukee ranks as the 39th largest metro area it shows the paper continues to have higher market penetration than many newspapers.įor years most newspapers offered free website access, only to realize this was a mistake. The Journal Sentinel ranked in 30th place that year among the top 100 newspapers, with a combined total of print and digital subscribers of 154,763. The Times, of course has a national audience. But as a story by 24/7 Wall St reported: “The only paper that currently has a paid circulation model that works extremely well is The New York Times,” with 1,557,000 digital-only subscribers in 2017, and a total print and digital subscriber total of more than 2.2 million. Increasingly, newspapers are looking to circulation revenue - increases in digital subscribers - to make up for massive losses in ad revenue. daily newspapers – both print and digital – fell 8% in 2016, marking the 28th consecutive year of declines… This decline put total ad revenue for the industry in 2016 at $18 billion,” about a third of the total just 10 years earlier, in 2006, when it was $49 billion. The meltdown of newspapers was documented by the Pew Research Center, which found that “total weekday circulation for U.S.
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