{"id":266153,"date":"2010-02-02T13:26:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T18:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100127\/2059297951.shtml"},"modified":"2010-02-02T13:26:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T18:26:00","slug":"massive-disconnect-paywall-analysis-claims-its-reasonable-to-expect-66-of-readers-to-pay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/266153","title":{"rendered":"Massive Disconnect: Paywall Analysis Claims It’s Reasonable To Expect 66% Of Readers To Pay"},"content":{"rendered":"

And we were amazed by reports that Stephen Brill actually expected 10% to 15%<\/a> of newspaper readers to pay up for the paywall he’s building for various newspapers (still none confirmed, as far as we know). A reporter over at Slate seems to have taken things to a new level. John points us to the back of the envelope analysis\/calculation of the NY Times’ decision to put up a paywall<\/a> that appears to have some highly questionable assumptions. The biggest one is that 66% of readers will pay. Yes, 66%. Oddly, this statement comes right after the reporter’s claim that, “a large percentage” of readers probably wouldn’t pay — but he seems to assume that “large percentage” is just 33%:<\/p>\n


\nFirst of all, a large percentage of these readers land on these sites though search engines, and therefore are not likely to consume a lot of pages. Such visitors, about a third of the total audience, must be removed from the pool of readers likely to pay for content.<\/p>\n

How much would people pay? According to a Boston Consulting Group survey, readers would agree to pay $3 per month on average. Interestingly enough, the BCG found the upper limit to be $6 for the “heavy print consumers” category.<\/p>\n

Coming back to the Washington Post, using the remaining 66 percent of total users likely to pay for content (7.34 million unique views\/month), the expected revenue could be considerable.
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I’d argue that getting even 5% to pay, as one recent study suggested<\/a>, may be wildly optimistic. 66% is downright delusional. While the pricing is clearly much higher, you would think that the recent example<\/a> of Newsday getting a grand total of 35 subscribers to its paywall would be telling. So, it’s difficult to take the rest of the analysis seriously, when it kicks off with such a bizarre assumption.<\/p>\n

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And we were amazed by reports that Stephen Brill actually expected 10% to 15% of newspaper readers to pay up for the paywall he’s building for various newspapers (still none confirmed, as far as we know). A reporter over at Slate seems to have taken things to a new level. John points us to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266153","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\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}