Eric Kaiser

Do you hear them? It’s the sound of newspaper management pounding their desks. It started out faint about a year ago, but has grown louder and louder the past month. Why all the noise? They want payment for their content.

Please, let’s silence this once and for all. I will tell you, from experience, that any barrier between viewers and content will fail, and fail miserably.

Oh, but we own our local news, people will pay. Really? I think you would be amazed to find out what people will settle for and how creative they will get to fill the void your newspaper’s content used to fill.

We had a paid model at the Sun Journal for two years. TWO YEARS! We implemented it at a time when we were rolling out a new site that included all our news from our four editions. The management team felt we should charge for this so people won’t drop the print edition for the free online product.

I wasn’t in favor of this for many reasons. After some convincing arguments we were able to reach a compromise, sorta.

We drafted a system where “premium” content, which were staff generated stories, were behind a pay wall. However, the compromise was viewers could access up to five (count ‘em), five premium stories a day for free. AP content and other wire content was wide open. We also didn’t include obituaries as premium content. To this day obits are the most viewed section of the site.

We launched this system in September 2004. Up to that point we were enjoying about 2 million pageviews a month. After we launched we saw less than 100,ooo pageviews for the month. We expected a drastic drop, but didn’t think it would be that bad. If that wasn’t bad enough I received nearly 500 emails and voicemails from viewers who were confused and angry.

We rode it out for two very long years. Before we pulled the plug we had 198 paid subscribers which did count towards our circulation numbers. But any circulation director will tell you that isn’t significant.

In the end, what we did was ruin a growing part of our business. We alienated our audience and pushed them to other free web sites providing similar news. And in most cases the same news if they waited a day when it hit the AP wire and made available to other Maine newspaper sites.

Another important factor, at least for us, was more than 65% of our traffic was from outside of our circulation area.

It has taken us nearly three years to bounce back to the 2 million pageviews per month. And consequently our online ad revenues to rise to an appreciable amount as well. Our online revenue is less than 2% of the overall revenue for the company.

You could argue the model here, but it clearly shows that any kind of barrier between viewers and your content is a bad idea.

I can’t help but think newspapers are just relapsing to old strategies. There needs to be more creativity in revenue models. What do those models look like? We’re all trying to figure that out. Check out John Newby’s blog at “Newsmedia Innovation” for some creative ideas as well as Steve Outing’s.

I will be posting our initiatives at the Sun Journal here after we launch them. For obvious reasons I cannot do it now ;+)