O.C. Register Goes Paywall
Another major newspaper decided to start charging for web access. The Orange County Register put up their paywall yesterday and they don't even give you any free previews. I don't blame them but that means I won't be able to read or link to the handful of opinion pieces I find in that paper every now and again.
This sucks. I don't really mind paying, but it's not worth it to pay the Register for the few articles I read of theirs each month. Besides, if I had to pay six or seven dollars for each the papers I read in a month, we'd be talking real money, at least by my standards.
What we need is to have a service like some of the porn sites use- or at least used to years ago: You pay a flat fee- say $15 to $25.00- to have access to all the news sites registered with that service. If that included most of the papers I read I'd be more than willing to pay for such a service. It would make online news affordable to all.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 10:19 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Seems like they're just adapting their old business model to the digital age. When it comes to the dead tree version, you either pay a fee to subscribe, or you buy single copies from news racks.
Now if you want to read the same content online, you subscribe. Same concept as the old model.
I like your idea of paying a fee to read several newspapers. However, in that case you divvy up the dollars. Instead of a newspaper getting, say, $25 a year for each online subscriber, the paper gets $1 or less. How is the paper going to pay for all that reporting with a fraction of the revenue? It would only pencil out if the package subscriptions brought in many, many, many more subscribers.
Another idea I'd like to see is the ability to pay for individual articles and columns. Maybe a story tease makes you interested. So you plop down 25 cents to read it. Or you pay a fee for 24 hours of site access.
Mega retailers such as Amazon need to develop a paywall browser plug-in... or maybe a start-up funded by a consortium of major newspapers could do it.
When you hit a page behind a paywall, you have 1-click access to the article for a few pennies, and a browser plug-in that allows you to archive/organize content you've purchased.
This works if paying is easy and fast, and the cost is low.
The lion share of revenue would come from non-local Internet traffic. If you analyze site traffic logs, you'll see a huge volume of traffic originates from people searching for things that are tangential to your web page in question. Half the time, people would buy an article just to see how it relates to the web search they conducted... it's worth it because it's only 3 cents and in 1-click the consumer has his answer.
This idea doesn't work for small or weekly newspapers because they don't have a large volume of web pages. You need tens of thousands of articles/web pages being viewed by the billions of people on this planet. And the plug-in needs to use a billing service that handles credit cards / currency from most of the countries in the world.
A weekly newspaper simply needs to remain a print product and use its website to supplement content for subscribers. Have a paywall, and post breaking news there.
The problem is, a great many people view sites such as LoCO has news sites instead of copy-and-paste machines for press releases. I fear we'll lose newspapers and be left with only press releases.
Jack wrote, "How is the paper going to pay for all that reporting with a fraction of the revenue?".
That's the one thing wrong with my idea.
Anon wrote, "Mega retailers such as Amazon need to develop a paywall browser plug-in... or maybe a start-up funded by a consortium of major newspapers could do it."
That could work.
Bottom line for me is I can't afford to pay $7.00 or more for each paper I read during a given month.
the oc register is going to learn an expensive lesson. readers already decided the register is not a good value for the money and increasing the cost is not going to convince the otherwise.
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