Andrew Sullivan’s bold paid-content plan, and Al Jazeera’s play for the U.S. P

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
A bellwether for blog paywalls?: Legendary blogger Andrew Sullivan joined the parade of journalists requiring readers to pay for their content online last week, though his move was particularly significant because, after all, he’s not a news organization but a single blogger (with a few staff members). Sullivan, who had been at The Daily Beast, will use a metered model charging readers $19.99 a year for full access, and he won’t host any ads.
At least initially, Sullivan’s plan was a massive success, bringing in more than $300,000 from 12,000 subscribers in the first day alone. Sullivan told The New York Times he’ll need $900,000 a year, and said it’s time journalism “started earning a living like everybody else.” He also told BuzzFeed the lack of advertising will free him to cover more out-of-the-way topics, rather than trying to chase pageviews. Complex editor Foster Kamer was more skeptical, calling the independent paywall a sales pitch to other publications on the loyalty of Sullivan’s audience.
The immediate question that came to pretty much everyone’s mind, it seems, was whether Sullivan’s paid-content model could work for other bloggers, particularly ones without Sullivan’s reach. Sullivan told TechCrunch to hold off on the prognostication, but still saw no reason it couldn’t scale to smaller blogs with less overhead. Others were equally optimistic: GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram described Sullivan’s paywall as a finger in the eye of the industrial journalism model, and The Guardian’s Dan Gillmor explained why he was subscribing, while also suggesting that blogs might eventually be able to band together to charge for content to multiple sites.
NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen argued that the key to Sullivan’s success in charging for content lies in his audience’s loyalty, which is built on his own distinct obsessions. Whether you can charge for content “depends on how strong the relationship is between you and the regular users of your site. Sullivan and crew have ample reason to bet on that relationship,” he said.
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