NYT: Pay Model Doesn't Show Traffic Decline

From the New York Times:

Under Pay Model, Little Effect Seen on Papers’ Web Traffic

By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: January 17, 2011

While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers have started to emerge.

Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise.

The sample size of Journalism Online’s data was small — about two dozen mostly small- and medium-size papers that had been charging readers for several months — so divining any potential pattern for large newspapers is difficult.

But the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.

Journalism Online said monthly unique visits to the Web sites included in its study fell zero to 7 percent, while page views fell zero to 20 percent. No publishers reported a decline in advertising revenue.

Unlike a strict pay wall — which requires a subscription to view almost all editorial content — a model like the one Journalism Online employed does not choke off huge amounts of Web traffic.

“If you set this meter conservatively, which we urge people to do, it’s a nonevent for 85, 90, 95 percent of the people who come to your Web site,” Mr. Brill said.

Mr. Brill said most papers set a limit on the number of free articles readers could view from five to 20 each month. Papers charged a range of monthly subscription fees from around $3.95 to $10.95.

L. Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who is helping run the project, said one lesson to be taken from the numbers so far is that readers were willing to pay for some, but not all, content online. Consumers “will pay for the few news brands they really rely on, if they use them a lot,” he said.

The newspapers using the Journalism Online venture were focused on local news and included The Commercial Dispatch in Mississippi and The York Daily Record in Pennsylvania.

With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, large American newspaper Web sites have so far remained free. The New York Times will become the largest American newspaper to employ a subscriber option for its Web site when it begins a system early this year to charge the heaviest users of NYTimes.com.

Tim Ruder, chief revenue officer of Perfect Market, a news media consultant, said that what worked for small papers would not necessarily work for large papers. But he added that since no larger national papers have switched from free to partial pay, it was difficult to make any guesses. “How well that success will translate to larger sites depends on many things, including the quality, nature and exclusivity of content,” he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 21, 2011


An article on Tuesday about initial results of an experiment in charging for newspaper Web content misstated part of the name of a Columbus, Miss., newspaper that is among those involved in the venture, called Journalism Online. It is The Commercial Dispatch, not The Columbus Dispatch.