The idea of paysites - where subscribers has been touted as the model that would save Old Media. A recent study claimed that news consumers would spend $500 per year for online news. Tell that to New York Newsday.
Placed behind a pay wall last fall, New York Newsday.com only attracted 35 people at $5 per person. The reason for this awful performance, according to Newsday, is that the website's offered for free to "Millions of Cablevision customers in the New York tri-state area and 75 percent of Long Island households, including all Newsday home delivery subscribers, now have exclusive access to newsday.com at no additional charge," Newsday said in a statement reported at Paid Content.
Watching the listed reasons why Newsday got only 35 people in three months is totally funny, and shows to what lengths people will go to protect a dumb idea. All of the points made miss a common fact of Internet life: people pay to be entertained, not informed. It's easy to click from one site to the other to get what the user considers is the same information. A report on the Iranian resistance in the New York Times is hampered by the free, and real-time reporting that Twitter offers.
Moreover, the next Twitter-level-impact social network is just around the corner. And that proves why the news organizations just don't get what's happening. Media is in a constant state of flux; to spend millions of dollars on new sites without some understanding of how technological change will impact them is a waste of money.
Pay walls do not work for news. But it will take more and more news organizations spending millions on new websites with pay walls that do not attract enough subscribers to pay for the site before they get it. By then it may be too late.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment