“According to one study, of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web. Similarly, of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web. With numbers like these, print is not going away anytime soon.
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There are two main models. The Financial Times uses a “meter,” or quota, approach. Visitors to FT.com are allowed access to a few free articles a month; to get more, they have to subscribe. This has netted the FT 117,000 subscribers paying up to $299 a year. Affluent and educated, those readers are very attractive to advertisers and so generate considerable ad revenue as well.
The Wall Street Journal’ s policy is much less restrictive. Visitors to WSJ .com are allowed free access to all articles about politics, culture, and other general-interest topics. Only those seeking entry to the Journal’s business and finance reports must pay
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Among the most vocal is Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor in chief of the popular Internet news-and-blog site The Huffington Post. “Walled gardens,” she insists, don’t work; the “link economy” is here to stay. (Free links, it must be noted, are vital to The Huffington Post’s health.) As evidence that pay walls don’t work, Huffington and others point to TimesSelect. Introduced by The New York Times in September 2005, it placed the paper’s columnists behind a pay wall and charged online readers $49.95 a year for admission. Two years later, the Times, concerned by the fall-off in traffic, reinstated its free-for-all policy.
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While some observers maintain that the FT and The Wall Street Journal are uniquely able to charge for content because the information they offer is so valuable to businessmen, Barber believes that a high-quality general-interest paper like The New York Times can charge as well.
(The FT, by the way, has introduced a number of specialized services, like “China Confidential,” which offer inside information on high-value subjects to readers willing to pay a premium. This points to another potentially lucrative revenue source for news organizations.)
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Now, let’s talk about start-ups;
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Founded in 1996 with the help of Microsoft, it initially struggled, but since being purchased by the Washington Post Company, in 2004, it has generally been profitable. Deriving 95 percent of its revenue from ads, Slate owes its success both to the Post’s backing and to its own journalistic formula—sharply written contrarian pieces offered for free on its site and promoted with clever headlines (for example, “Where Are the Jewish Gangsters of Yesteryear? Or, what we can learn about ‘respectability’ from Bernie Madoff and Meyer Lansky”). In an effort to replicate Slate’s success, the Post in 2008 created the Slate Group, and since then it has introduced several spin-offs, including The Root (African- American affairs), The Big Money (business), and ForeignPolicy.com.
The one site that has turned a profit without the aid of print or a sponsor is Talking Points Memo. In nine years, Josh Marshall has built it from a one-man blog into a bustling political journal with 1.5 million unique visitors a month. TPM relies mainly on advertising—everything from Comcast to T-shirt companies—and its combination of low overhead and an engaged readership has enabled it to thrive. Over the summer, Marshall agreed for the first time to accept outside capital—between $500,000 and $1 million from a group of investors that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. With it, he plans to expand his site from its current eleven employees to about twenty, with the possibility of adding more if the site’s traffic—and revenues—expand sufficiently.
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& then came another new idea:
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“Endowments,” they wrote, “would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.” Taking the Times as an example, they estimated that, with a newsroom costing somewhat more than $200 million a year to run, and with some additional outlays for overhead, the paper would need an endowment of around $5 billion. “Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance,” they declared.
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the article then describes a few successful non-profit cases which use “endowments” as their main revenue source.
Finally, it talks about NPR:
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At a time when not only newspapers but also commercial broadcasters are struggling, NPR has thrived. In 2008, the cumulative weekly audience for its daily news shows increased by 9 percent, to a record 20.9 million listeners.
… NPR draws on several money sources: its endowment, foundations, corporate underwriting, and dues and fees from its more than 860 member stations, all of which are noncommercial. This last stream is the largest, making up 43 percent of the total. Most of that money is raised from listeners during those annoying pledge drives. In short, NPR is supported mainly by those who actually consume its product—a huge advantage at a time of anemic advertising.
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I like that part; the fact that is paid by its audience & how this resembles traditional journalism in an age where advertising didn’t exist.
Source | NY review of books
