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In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?
So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?
The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.
[…]
The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million, according to Mr. Jimenez. With those 35 people, they’ve grossed about $9,000.
To be fair, a huge part of their audience gets free access.
Anyone who has a newspaper subscription is allowed free access; anyone who has Optimum Cable, which is owned by the Dolans and Cablevision, also gets it free. Newsday representatives claim that 75 percent of Long Island either has a subscription or Optimum Cable.
“We’re the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO,” sniffed one Newsday reporter.
I wonder if any of those 35 subscribers were under the age of 60…
I never had any problem getting paid.
In general, people won’t willingly pay for something they can get for free. How all this ends up for the news industry I hate to guess.
Predictions:
If you want the model for the apple tablet and the future of newspapers… begin with the NY Times Reader 2. Beautiful app. And subscribe for less than $4 a week.
And the success of online WSJ? …. Why do people pay for WSJ online subscriptions?
Offer original content that is worth paying for that you can get no where else.
Why is this newsday not a story? People who pay for the newspaper get online content access for FREE!!
I have always wondered why each physical printing (IE paid copy) of a magazine or newspaper did not include one time/one day/one month ‘password’ access to their website.
edit- I should have been clearer.. NY Times reader is not iphone app but pc app
The cost structure was completely wrong and it’s a bad sign that Newsday didn’t realize it.
There are two models that might work — micro-payments for individual articles or $5 a month for ALL newspapers.
Subscription delivery to portable devices is also key — publishers need to get eBook readers down to the price of cell phones and they need to do it now — ten years ago was when they really should have done it.
Apparently the new iTablet will come with a subscription to newsday.com, plus free health-care for everyone.
The iTablet will cost $12,000 a year and will be mandatory to purchase.
I’m thinking of the good old days when the reporting sections of the newspaper were the free stuff included when you bought the classifieds.
Lets ask some strange questions..
HOW did papers survive in the past.?
News was news..
The adverts paid for the paper.
The Price of the paper, paid for delivery.
Thats ALL
PUBLIC news should be PUBLIC FREE.
If they find something interesting that OTHERS could/would NOT have found…SELL IT.
It costs alot of money to post an advert in a news paper.
CABLE TV made a promise long ago, that NEVER HAPPENED. Fewer/no commercials.
Why?
Its the ADVERTS that PAY for the channels.
LOCAL broadcast TV was free. it had commercials. it was LOCAL.
Cable cant advert LOCAL anymore. unless you get LOCAL channels, which the FCC forced, but STILL doesnt get ALL the local channels.
NOW, you pay cable for 200+ channels.
They get paid for commercials they produce.
you watch about 20..and pay EXTRA for the channels you DONT watch. If ESPN/MSNBC/Discovery raises prices to broadcast on cable, EVEN if you dont watch it, YOU PAY for it. If they offered $1 per channel for the CHANNELS you wanted, you could pay $20 for the 20 channels you WANT. SOME channels PAY to be broadcast on CABLE..most of the religious channels.
Why are we paying for something we dont want or NEED.?
So lets see last year the auto industry was failing because of over paid auto workers – they were making $50-75,000/year.
Before that industry was forced to move to China because of high cost manufacturing labor those workers weren’t even making $50,000/yr.
Now we have an entertainment/news industry that says it isn’t making enough money. Hum – lets see what was Cohen’s severance? $35,000,000. How much did they pay the Stars of “Friends” – $1,000,000 each per episode. You regularly have National newscasters making several million/year and the you have Rush Limbaugh making $35,000 per year.
If the entertainment/news industry wants to fix it’s money problems the answer is simple. Get you salaries back in line with the rest of us.
Set aside politics for a second and look at the model the Huffington Post uses. They are growing, have local editions, and attracting high end writers. There are models that work.
Barfing your content onto a web site is pretty much a brain dead 90’s approach. You may as well update your Geocities site using IE4.
This is a complete joke, this type of mentality is why the news industry is having big problems. There trying the same principles of the print industry and applying it to digital media and it just doesn’t work!
#2: It isn’t just that people will take it for free, but that they can get a variety of different slants on the news instead of being forced to swallow one or two particularly slanted takes offered by local newspapers. One of the reasons I stopped taking a newspaper, more than a decade ago, was two-fold. First, I never had time to read it and most just got thrown in the recycle bin unopened, but secondly, because I couldn’t stand the political bent that the paper forced into every story, a political bent that I did not share. I want my news source to be as bias-free as possible, something I can get online for free and something I almost never can get in a print (or online version of a print) newspaper.
They’re supposed to be giving you the news, not forcing their political biases down your throat.
ECA is head on.
I used to believe that intelligent and creative businessmen that knew “how to win” were commonplace.
But newspapers are proving me all wrong.
The junky advertising papers I don’t want show up on my driveway for free … meanwhile the REAL newspaper is going broke?
Seems they aren’t adding 2+2 together and getting 4.
@13 “I want my news source to be as bias-free as possible, something I can get online for free”
Lemme tell ya … all news sources are biased in some way.
For instance, you are biased towards the political aspect of the news when 90% of news is non-political like crime, local events, weather and such.
#10,
You need to watch PBS..
The LAST auto workers were making around $15k per year..where was the money going?? NOT into anything to FIX the car.
China?? LMAO, those folks are getting <$5k per year. NOW add to it that SHIPPING products back to the usa??
You claim Others in movies are making MILLIONS, and Rush only makes 35k per year??
I think that $400million contract is MORE then enough.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_estimated_net_worth_of_Rush_Limbaugh
#10, I dont know where you heard RUSH made $35k per year, but just LIVING in New York, you better be making OVER $100k..
NOW, he has Incorporated Himself, which means all the money goes to the CORP, to pay all his expenses(so he wont be taxed for them) and he might only be getting $35k for pocket money.
I suggest you BLOW on your ear and clean out the cobwebs..
#13 Cephus
You have access to more news sources and more diversity of opinions than ever in the history of the world. Use a tool like Google Reader to aggregate the sources you want into one spot and voila -> you have your own newspaper.
It’s finally happened – LA Times invited me to try out latimes.visualdna.com which asks some questions – where I pick the best fitting pictures, and then comes up with a personality profile – of me. This seems to have been pushed in Sci-Fi for ever, but here it is being used by a media source – to try and capture my interest. I don’t know. It feels creepy – as Mr. D would say – and my impulse is to close the page anyway.
Tikotikotiko