Newspaper Paywalls Accelerating

eByline Blog reporting:
by Susan Johnston on Jul 30 2012
It’s the year of the paywall: American newspapers have committed, for better or worse, to making readers pay for the news online, after years of giving away on the web what they charge a fortune for in print. Previously, Ebyline looked at statistics of paywall adoption and discovered that larger newspapers are building paywalls at significantly higher rates. But examining paywalls by newspaper size only tells part of the story.
Data out from the Newspaper Association of America (sorry, it’s behind a paywall!) now lets us know when newspapers activated their paywalls and what flavor of paywall each paper uses. A few trends pop out of the data (which has a few holes but is otherwise pretty comprehensive): meters galore, discounts for print subscribes are overwhelmingly popular and, most significantly, an accelerating pace of adoption that peaked late last year but is picking up steam again. This suggests that while experimentation with paywall specifics continues, the journalism industry believes they ultimately have a solution to their digital problem.
The metered paywall approach (allowing readers to read, say, 5 or 10 articles before they have to pay for content) is the most popular, with 84% of the newspapers listed in NAA’s database. It’s also the paywall strategy used by The New York Times, which recently changed the number of free articles readers can access to 10, down from 20, earlier this year. On average, newspapers allow 11.2 free articles before readers encounter the paywall.
A handful of publications are using variations such as a paywall only for certain types of content (as with staff-written local news and sports at the Waco Tribune-Herald) or a two-site approach where one is paid and the other is free (as at The Boston Globe).
Newspapers give discounts (or free online access) to print subscribers in 94% of paywall cases, which suggests that they’re trying to transition print subscribers to the web without losing print subscribers.
http://ebyline.biz/2012/07/newspaper-paywalls-accelerating/