Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Out of all the millions of people who live here, only 35 have paid for access to the Newsday website.

Last week, the New York Times announced that it would begin charging web visitors for access to its website, starting in 2011. Aside from financial papers and specialty/industry publications, no one’s really been successful putting their content behind a paywall, so it certainly seemed like a gamble, but perhaps a necessary one. The Times would have a year to figure out the best price and payment structure and lay the other groundwork.

Times executives may find themselves rethinking their decision this week, however, because of the paywall news from their Long Island neighbors. The folks at Newsday decided to start charging five dollars a week for access to their website last October as part of $4 million website redesign effort. At an internal company meeting this week, publisher Terry Jimenez revealed that the paywall wasn’t going so well. In the three months since it put up the paywall, the newspaper which is a major source of local New York and Long Island news and boasts a circulation of around 400,000, has managed to sign up only 35 paid online subscribers.

Thirty-five.

To be fair, in a statement to PaidContent.org, Newsday claims that “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.”

No matter how you slice it, though, this is an epic paywall fail. Even if 75% households really do have free online access, you’d expect to do better than 35 subscribers with the remaining 25% considering your market is New York and Long Island. We’re not talking about a small market, here, folks. This is the largest media market in the United States.

Sure, the Times might have a much more global appeal, but considering the Newsday numbers, the Times can expect only a couple thousand subscribers, which most definitely will not pay the bills. Apple‘s announcement of the iPad might change some of the math here if the Times can figure out a way to get people to pay for a digital edition of their paper, but overall, the results of the Newsday experiment should serve as a warning to the Times. Sometime in the next eleven months, we’ll see if they’ve heeded it.