Monday
Apr122010
PaidContent Survey: Newspaper Paywalls Are Not Effective
Monday, April 12, 2010 at 01:45AM
This much we have known for a while: the digital display advertising marketplace grows at the cost of the traditional print media. Looking at the decline of newspaper ad placements is one effective way of getting a sense of the health and future prospects of online display. An important aspect of this is shown when we watch what the newspaper publisher attempts online.
Making readers pay for newspaper content through a paywall is a strategy that the industry was very enthusiastic about some years ago. Now? Not so much. And it's no wonder why, according to a survey conducted by PaidContent.org.
As Henry Blodget in SAI Business Insider points out in his post Guess How Many People Pay To Read Local Newspapers With Paywalls? there might not be more than a $1 million market for paid local newspaper content in total.
No, it won't. An advertiser looking to "go local" has so many choices online today, ranging from buying media based on geotargeting (displaying an ad upon a national or international publisher's site that is targeted based on the viewer's location) to reaching for the local online competition directly.
That is, after all the central difference between the old and new media models. Today, the advertiser is only held down by the flexibility and efficiency of the tools he uses to create , optimize and place the display advertising. The one problem the advertiser doesn't have is lack of opportunity to reach his audience online.
Making readers pay for newspaper content through a paywall is a strategy that the industry was very enthusiastic about some years ago. Now? Not so much. And it's no wonder why, according to a survey conducted by PaidContent.org.
As Henry Blodget in SAI Business Insider points out in his post Guess How Many People Pay To Read Local Newspapers With Paywalls? there might not be more than a $1 million market for paid local newspaper content in total.
[The survey] found 24 local papers with paywalls.
Between them, they had about 10,000 online-only subscribers (our math, adding estimates for the papers that didn't report any information).
Eyeballing the list of monthly subscription prices (online only), it seems the average monthly online-only price is about $10, or $120 a year.
This suggests that the total online subscription revenue for all the local newspapers in the country is about $1.2 million. (Throw in another few million for papers Joseph might have missed and let's say the total number is $5-$10 million.)
That's not going to save a lot of newspapers.
No, it won't. An advertiser looking to "go local" has so many choices online today, ranging from buying media based on geotargeting (displaying an ad upon a national or international publisher's site that is targeted based on the viewer's location) to reaching for the local online competition directly.
That is, after all the central difference between the old and new media models. Today, the advertiser is only held down by the flexibility and efficiency of the tools he uses to create , optimize and place the display advertising. The one problem the advertiser doesn't have is lack of opportunity to reach his audience online.
Reader Comments (1)
Thank you for the assist!