{"id":238059,"date":"2010-01-27T09:40:34","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T14:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.34279"},"modified":"2010-01-27T09:33:09","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T14:33:09","slug":"nyts-paywall-could-really-work-heres-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/238059","title":{"rendered":"NYT’s Paywall Could Really Work. Here’s Why."},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times’ 2011 online paywall could bolster the Website’s revenue or erode its online readership and advertising. I think it’s a necessary idea, but I don’t know if it will work. The Big Money’s Frederic Filloux makes the case for optimism<\/a>. More than an interesting defense of the paywall, his article is an expert analysis of newspaper economics.<\/p>\n

More people are reading the New York Times (and the Washington Post,
\nand the Wall Street Journal…) than ever because of the Web. Why
\ncan’t they monetize these record-breaking numbers? Because the online
\nad rates are so paltry that these papers’ revenue per
\nonline-reader is a small fraction of their revenue per print-reader<\/i>. Consider the Washington Post:<\/p>\n

\n

For the full 2008 year, washingtonpost.com made $122.7 million in
\nadvertising revenue. Applied to a monthly audience of 11 million unique
\nvisitors (we’ll assume this stable audience is a yearly average), this
\ntranslates into $11 per visitor per year. That’s the ARPU (average
\nrevenue per user) for the Post<\/em>, it comes only from
\nadvertising–and it’s 20 times less than the ARPU for print readers.
\nYou see, then, the goal: Having people pay for content is a way to
\nclose this 20x gap between ARPUs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That ad base needs a supplement, and subscribers would fit the bill. Filloux calculates that 66 percent of readers access the Times<\/i> through
\nthe homepage rather than exclusively through search engines. Some back of the envelope math comes to this:<\/p>\n

If 25 percent of that group could be converted to paying $6 a month, it will double the Times<\/em>‘ online revenue. Convert only 10 percent at that price and you still get a 43 percent bump.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think 25 percent is too optimistic, and $6 a month is too expensive.
\nI think more realistic numbers might be 10 percent converted to pay
\ncloser to $3 dollars a month, a 20 percent bump in revenue. That’s not insignificant! And even if nytimes.com traffic falls 20 percent, they won’t lose 20 percent of their ad revenue because advertisers pay a premium for loyal paying audiences (Filloux claims the WSJ charges 30 percent more for ads in the “pay zone”).<\/p>\n

In conclusion, I still think this paywall can work. Especially if the Times incorporates some of my ideas for keeping its homepage sticky.<\/a>


\n

\n Email this Article<\/a>
\n Add to digg<\/a>
\n Add to Reddit<\/a>
\n Add to Twitter<\/a>
\n Add to del.icio.us<\/a>
\n Add to StumbleUpon<\/a>
\n Add to Facebook<\/a>
\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times’ 2011 online paywall could bolster the Website’s revenue or erode its online readership and advertising. I think it’s a necessary idea, but I don’t know if it will work. The Big Money’s Frederic Filloux makes the case for optimism. More than an interesting defense of the paywall, his article is an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-238059","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238059","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238059"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238059\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}