A mixed bag on apps: What The New York Times learned with NYT Opinion and NYT Now. The New York Times’ announcement today that it was cutting 100 positions in its newsroom was coupled with changes to two of its most closely watched experiments, each just a few months old: NYT Now and NYT Opinion. The two apps will meet different fates: NYT Now will live on with a tweaked subscription model, while NYT Opinion will be shut down at month’s end, having been unable to find a substantial paying audience. The two apps are small parts of the Times’ overall financial picture, which shows a few more positive elements, like a jump in digital advertising revenue. But they were key to the Times’ strategy of creating a fleet of paid apps to target smaller audiences that wouldn’t pay for a full subscription. (Growth in that full-freight number has begun to slow.) What did the Times learn along the way to today? NYT Opinion: Not enough audience Andy Rosenthal, editorial page editor for the Times, said the app’s audience was loyal, but that it had trouble breaking out a small core.
The newsonomics of new cutbacks at The New York Times. It looks like New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson got a little ahead of himself. Call it premature exuberance. The Times had built major internal confidence, riding a wave of paywall-induced exhilaration, and eagerly moved on to what it had believed would be icing on the reader-revenue cake. I called it Paywalls 2.0 (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″). The Times has tried to combine four magical words, squishing them together in ways no one had yet: Digital. Niche. Mobile. In that alchemy, the Times relied on deep research whose forecasts have proven close to the mark, as the Times has climbed to about 870,000 paying digital-only readers and reaped pricing rewards by combining print-plus-digital all-access subs. Those forecasts haven’t come true, and in their wake, we see the substantial cut of 100 newsroom positions announced today, and a change in its niche apps strategy.
How much had the Times invested in the new strategy? Is this a major business reversal? The New York Times needs to rethink its strategy — untargeted mini paywalls aren’t the answer. How newspapers decide to use paywalls. Published Updated 09/17/14 4:15 pm Before charging for digital content, doing research seems like good business. It can help publishers learn how particular audiences will react to a transition from free content to paying for content. But a recent study shows that rarely do publishers report doing audience research before making the transition to a paywall. University of Missouri School of Journalism scholars Mike Jenner, Esther Thorson, and Anna Kim analyzed paywall practices by surveying 416 publishers, or designees such as executive editors, from daily newspapers across the U.S.
Less than three in 10 dailies conducted focus groups, fielded audience surveys, or tested paywalls with a subset of site visitors prior to moving to paid content. Publishers consult each other, not audiences, before launching paywalls The actions that surveyed publishers took prior to implementing their new paywalls Where publishers set the paywall meter Whether paywalls actually pay off is another question. Ken Doctor: Guardian Space & Guardian Membership, playing the physical/digital continuum. Can it be that the solution to newspaper companies’ digital woes lies in the physical world? While news reading may be rapidly going digital, humans still, at this writing, spend their time in the terrestrial world. Some even enjoy the social activity that actual physical community events can provide. The Guardian, the world’s third largest news site, is acting on that principle with its big announcement today.
The high-profile news: The Guardian is redeveloping 30,000 square feet of falling-apart old warehouse, the Grade II-listed Midland Goods Shed in the heart of London, just blocks away from its Kings Cross-area headquarters. They cover “events, activities and courses.” Events are one part of this new play. The Guardian famously has eschewed paywalls, though it has charged for mobile apps.
Yet, the delta between the 300,000 and the 105 million is what The Guardian’s new events/membership strategy is all about. Let’s be clear here. Further, we’ve seen membership tested by publishers. Interesting idea: Esquire puts up a paywall for a single article and will donate the proceeds. As anyone who follows the media industry knows by now, paywalls are the order of the day for most newspapers and magazines, and in most cases they block off everything that a publication puts online.
But what if you had a paywall around a single article? And not only that, but what if a majority of the proceeds from that paywall went somewhere other than to the media outlet? That’s what Esquire is doing with an article about the September 11 terrorist attacks. As Advertising Age describes it in a recent post, the magazine is taking a 2003 piece about the so-called “falling man” photograph and putting it behind a paywall that asks readers to pay $2.99.
This isn’t the first time the magazine has tried an article-specific paywall: it did so last year with a piece called “The Prophet,” which asked readers to pay $1.99 for an article about a neurosurgeon who claimed to have seen God while in a coma — which sold 7,000 copies — and it tried again with a profile of actor Matt Damon. Interesting idea: Esquire puts up a paywall for a single article and will donate the proceeds. The newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ merger, creating the world’s largest paywall tech company. How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world? This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have moved in that direction, with Latin America and parts of Asia joining the parade.
Today’s announcement of the merger of Press+ and Piano Media further ratifies the paywall notion — and yet marks an early consolidation in a still-toddling marketplace. Smaller European-centric Piano Media has bought U.S. -centric Press+, creating by far the largest paywall tech company. That’s a double sign: showing the necessity of paywalls to the future of news business models — and the fact that there’s not a huge amount of money to be made in supplying this technology to the world’s press. It’s also worth noting this is also a global play, one more indication that news is going global as a business. Slovakian Piano Media acquires Press+ and aims to take paid digital content global. Only close watchers of paid digital content (paywalls) will have heard of Piano Media, a little three-year old Eastern European start-up that has steadily been adding clients.
Today, Piano leaps to the front of the paywall vendor line, announcing its acquisition of Press+, the dominant provider in the United States. That same little company also hired Kelly Leach, publisher of the Wall Street Journal’s European edition, as its new CEO, and plans aggressive expansion into Latin American and Asian markets where digital pay is just beginning to get serious attention from publishers. If the transaction, being described as a merger, sounds like a minnow swallowing a whale, it is. Press+, which Poynter uses to solicit donations, is 8.8 times as big in revenues, Piano communications director David Brauchli said in an e-mail exchange. The transaction is being financed by 3TS Capital Partners, a Central European venture capital firm.
Now roughly 600 U.S. and Canadian papers have such systems. Slovakian Piano Media acquires Press+ and aims to take paid digital content global. The Newsonomics of The New York Times’ pay fence. The Dallas Morning News abandons its “premium experience” strategy. The New York Times’ new app strategy seems lackluster at best — so what does it do now? NYT Now, out today, mixes lots of good mobile-centric ideas with moments of caution. If you’ve got an iPhone or an iPod touch, NYT Now is out now and a free download.
The new app from The New York Times promises to offer a subset of the Times’ content to a mobile-focused audience that gets its news on the go and wants a lower price point. It’s the most interesting mobile app from a traditional news company in years. Ken Doctor ran through the business implications of NYT Now for us last week, but now that I’ve gotten a chance to play around with it, I wanted to throw in my two cents on the ideas behind it — the design, the user experience, and the ways in which it strays from (and remains tied to) the Times’ other digital properties. Nota bene: This is Day One, of course — anything here could change or look different in the light of further use.
The story selection looks very similar to NYTimes.com. If you were hoping for a radically different presentation of individual Times stories in this mobile-optimized context, you’re not getting it. But it’s a pretty thin layer. Embrace the unbundling: The Boston Globe is betting it’ll be stronger split up than unified. The model for the 20th-century American newspaper was to be all things to all people, in one amalgamated package. One daily bundle of newsprint could give you baseball box scores, reports of intrigue in Moscow, gardening tips, an investigation into city hall, and Calvin and Hobbes. The Boston Globe is betting that the model of the 21st-century American newspaper won’t be a single digital product — it’ll be a lot of them.
Since 2011, the Globe has been perhaps the best known proponent of what’s been known as the two-site strategy: a paid site that includes the newspaper’s top journalism (BostonGlobe.com) and a free site that aims to be more realtime, quick-hit, and webby (Boston.com). It’s a strategy that hasn’t been without problems — ask your average Bostonian to describe the difference between the two sites and you might get a confused look — but the Globe’s plan for the future is to separate the sites even more, not to bring them back together.
Expect more to come. Slate debuts its membership model, Slate Plus. How publishers' premium membership programs stack up. For many publishers, memberships are the new subscriptions. From The New York Times to Slate to the National Journal, media stalwarts are increasingly pitching memberships as a way for readers to get their hands on exclusive content and experiences. But not all memberships are created equal. Some give readers greater access to reporters, while others strive to make members’ online reading experiences a bit less painful. (Nobody has yet offered a platinum membership that comes without slideshows. Don’t be surprised if one does, however.) Prices, too, vary widely: The New York Times charges nearly $600 for a year of its Times Premier subscription; Slate, on the other hand, is asking for just $50.
Here’s a look at how publishers’ premium memberships stack up to their default reading experiences. Slate Plus Announced on Monday, Slate’s “totally-not-a-paywall” Slate Plus is a $50-a-year membership aimed at the site’s most dedicated readers. New York Times Premier Ars Technica Premier. The Newsonomics of Newspapers’ Slipping Digital Performance. Follow Newsonomics @kdoctor First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab As we approach the middle of the 2010s, where do newspapers fit in the battle for America’s largest ad sector — digital? And how well are all those paywalls doing? Two reports tumbled into the public sphere within a week of each other recently, and together, they help us answer both questions. The numbers here show that the newspaper industry overall — a relative minority of leading-edge players aside — is trending the wrong way. Both digital ad revenue and reader revenue continue to grow, but both are less positive than they were a year ago.
Let’s start with the overall digital ad market. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s 2013 full year report is its usual rosy self. That’s a big difference — 25 percent. Metrics are a big issue in the web world, but this ad delta — print and digital combined — is an outsized one. There’s a lot more in the report than the top-line numbers, and we’ll get to some of that below. Embrace the unbundling: The Boston Globe is betting it’ll be stronger split up than unified. The Washington Post goes national by offering free digital access to readers of local newspapers. Lessons from 'one package, one price' paywall in Norway. Credit: Image by Thinkstock In 2012, Norwegian-based newspaper Fædrelandsvennen launched its freemium digital subscription model, which placed more than two thirds of online content behind a paywall. The paid content model adopts a "one package, and one price" approach, news editor Christian Stavik explained at the Digital Innovators' Summit in Berlin today.
"You can call us and say you don’t want print, that's fine," he said, but added that regardless, "the price stays the same". "You pay for content, not platform". When the paywall was first launched in May "we fell 17 per cent in reach", but the site's traffic has now returned to "levels before launch", with mobile and tablet the specific areas seeing an increase.
During the process of introducing the paywall a number of lessons were learned, specifically around the power of communication. Communicate with your team and wider world "Internal communication was key in our transformation" he said. Keep on top of technology Keep improving. The newsonomics of NYT Now. It’s an ambitious launch. Within it, we can hear many of the digital news buzzwords of the moment: mobile first, curation, paywall, native ads, voice. NYT Now debuts on April 2, side-stepping the foolish superstitions of a day earlier, and about five months after first disclosing its Paywalls 2.0 plans (“The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0″).
NYT Now’s timing seems right, and in my first testing of it, it offers reasons to believe it’ll get a lot of usage. But big questions loom as the final preparations for launch are made within the Times. The biggest, of course, is how many current non-subscribers will see enough value to pay. There are also questions about how NYT Now fits with the Times’ other native apps and mobile web experiences. The positioning of the app shows the resurgent Times’ confidence, bolstered by the “They like us, they really like us!”
The product The product is straightforward. The journalism The journalism is NYT Now’s foundation. The user experience. Jessica Lessin talks about paywalls, The Information and the virtues of knowing who your audience is. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin got some attention when she left the newspaper six months ago to start a new online news venture, and this week she launched the project, known as The Information: a subscription-only technology and business news service that costs $399 a year and has no free content or “leaks” in its paywall. The hardness of the wall and the price surprised many — given the experiences of some other new-media outlets that tried and failed with a hard paywall model — but Lessin said in an interview she is convinced she can build a sustainable business based on that approach.
“People talk about this type of paywall is good or bad, but it really depends on the content. If you look at what Paul Carr (of NSFW Corp.) is doing, it’s great, but I think he would agree that no one is going to spend $400 a year on it — the only type of content you’re going to pay that much money for is content that helps you in your business. Beyond Paywalls, New Ways to Charge for News. If 2013 was the year of the Great Paywall experiment in Internet news, perhaps 2014 will come in like a wrecking ball, blasting holes in the theory that everyone should pay for accessing news online. At least that’s one scenario suggested by recent developments in the experimental paywalls that news organizations have been imposing and tweaking on their websites at an accelerated pace since The New York Times instituted its metered paywall in 2011. This fall, The Dallas Morning News dismantled the general paywall it first put up in 2011, declaring it had failed to entice enough people to pay in order for it to make good business sense.
Related story: “Will a Generation of Paywall Jumpers Pay for News?” While letting everyone read its content for free again, the Dallas paper announced it would still try to entice some readers to pay by offering a new digital subscription to access a version of its website containing fewer ads and a more aesthetically pleasing design. The Dallas Morning News. Paywalls Lift CPMs for Some Magazines and Newspapers | Media. Online Subscription Benchmark Report 2013 Special Pre-Publication Offer. The FT offers up “gift articles” for subscribers. The Newsonomics of Time and Money, and Google Surveys. As Digital First Media Announces Its Paywalls, 41% of US Dailies Will Soon Have Them.
Recent Talks Videos. The paywall mirage: More are paying for news, but most aren’t and likely never will. Paywalls open publishers' eyes to modern marketing. Another wall tumbles: The Dallas Morning News dismantles its paywall, tries to sell premium features instead. The NYT paywall don't get no respect. Do Paywalls Change the Engagement Equation? | Magda Abu-Fadil. Five things Jessica Lessin needs to keep in mind about paywalls as she launches The Information. The Information wants to be $39 a month. Letter From the Editor. Ken Auletta and David Carr discuss The Guardian newspaper's business model.
Has putting up a paywall at The Guardian become a moral imperative rather than a choice? Guardian says open journalism is the only way forward. The newsonomics of The New York Times’ Paywalls 2.0. Why the New York Times needs to think less about products and more about relationships. Paywalls in my back yard: A forecast for newspaper business models | Media Disruptus | A MEDIA FUTURIST ON WHAT'S NEXT TO DISRUPT NEWS. Paywall 2.0: why focusing on customers is the only way to win | Media Network | Guardian Professional. Five ways media companies can build paywalls around people instead of content. American Press Institute - 10 Secrets of Successful Meters, Pay Walls and Reader Revenue Strategies. The Dallas Morning News to launch new premium website for subscribers.
What’s happening at Bloomberg is the logical extension of a paywall-focused media business. Why I am unapologetic about paywalls or promotions. The newsonomics of the shopping of Press+ and the coming of Paywalls 2.0. Are you paying too much for the NYT? Le « New York Times » segmente ses abonnements Web. World Press Trends: Print and digital together increasing newspaper audiences. Q&A with The New York Times' Denise Warren. If my newspaper puts up a metered paywall, how many people will pay? Here’s some data. An Idea for The Times’ Pay Wall. Will a Generation of Paywall-Jumpers Pay for News?