As Rupert Murdoch moves forward with his plans to put in place a paywall for the online sites of some of his UK newspapers, he may want to look around carefully. Jeff Sonderman points us to the news of a UK newspaper publisher that put in place a paywall of £5 for three months of access to its newspaper websites late last year — only to find that the paywall has been quietly dropped after less than ten people signed up at one of the papers:
A source at one of the titles involved in the trial said it had been a “disaster” and that the number of people subscribing had been in single figures.
This fits with Newsday’s experiment, where only 35 non-Cablevision subscribers were willing to sign up. Newspapers keep over-estimating the willingness of people to pay to read websites.
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