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Would You Pay to Read This Story?
The Wall Street Journal makes millions from its pay website. Here are the secrets to its success—and what other papers can learn from it.
After nearly 15 years of giving its product away to younger and more technologically adept customers, while continuing to charge older and less-adaptable customers—that was never going to end well—newspapers may finally be coming to their senses about the imperative of receiving value for value delivered on the Internet.
Signs of this are cropping up almost daily: New York Times executive editor Bill Keller muses aloud about the possibilities for charging. Cablevision (the new owner of Newsday) says it will start charging somehow—perhaps in conjunction with cable-TV service. New Hearst newspapers president Steve Swartz announces Hearst papers will charge for some content. Meanwhile, newspapers that once insisted that their websites be free are now dead or dying in Denver, Tucson, and Seattle. And newspapers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and New Haven scramble to reorganize in bankruptcy.
Most Journal readers used to have their companies pay for their Journal subscriptions. But that hasn't been the case in more than 20 years.
In such a situation, it is important to separate facts from myths that have grown up around the idea of charging for newspaper content online. Having helped manage the Wall Street Journal, the largest newspaper to charge for content, during the early years of the Internet revolution, and more recently as the biographer of the Journal’s animating genius, Barney Kilgore, I hope I can help shed some light on these critical differences.
Fact: The basis of the Journal’s ability to charge a million subscribers for content is the distinctive value of that content. Not everything in the Journal is unique, but enough is—enough news and analysis that can’t be found elsewhere—that one million readers pay for it today.
That’s been the basis of the Journal’s appeal from long before the Internet was even conceived. In building the Journal from a narrow financial daily selling 30,000 copies daily, largely in Lower Manhattan, to a national business publication that sold one million copies from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kilgore understood that such a “second newspaper” could only succeed if its offering was distinctive from readers’ first (local) paper. Today, the Internet has, in effect, made all newspapers “second reads.” Kilgore’s disciple, Peter Kann, the Journal’s publisher from 1989 to 2002, instinctively sensed the need to charge on the Web while others were misled by the false mantra that “information wants to be free”—even while creating it continued to cost money.
Do we really believe that the Wall Street Journal is the only newspaper in America that publishes distinctive content? Of course not. The Rocky Mountain News is being mourned precisely because the opposite is true. But newspapers need to be relentlessly honest with themselves about what elements of their content are sufficiently distinctive to be worth money to readers. Then, as available resources contract, they need to channel their efforts toward creating more such content—and to devote less to efforts that aren’t distinctive, and that don’t create value sufficient to command value in return.
In doing this, they need also to confront a number of myths that have become widely accepted in the newspaper business.
Myth: Charging for content consigns a newspaper’s website to insignificance, and removes it from the “conversation” of the blogs. This has been exploded by the Journal in the 18 months or so since the Rupert Murdoch takeover. In that time the smartest move made by the Journal has been to create a hybrid model where nearly all Journal stories can be reached, for free, by way of a Google News search—and are available for links by bloggers—while the Journal site itself, as an integrated package, remains behind a pay wall. The result has been that the Journal has climbed the charts to now rank ahead of all but two free newspaper sites in terms of page views, according to web-information company Alexa.
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This article makes some good points--leaving aside the author's obvious bias as a former employee of the WSJ.
However, one important caveat to his statement about the volume of paid suscriptions to the Journal: many or most of such subscriptions are sold together with print subscriptions. Mine was--I pay $99 for a year of delivered print copies and web access. That makes it very hard to say how much the web alone adds the Journal's coffers.
For $103.00 no thanks. There is plenty of news on the internet can barely keep up with it all. The only paper I would pay for would be a favorite, and that would be just to keep it from going under. Otherwise think of another way to save the newspaper business.
And PS that favorite would not be the WSJ
Obviously Rick, it is about how much free access was taking away from sales.
You are so quick to tear people down, that is part of the problem too. People are sick are reading stuff that divides but doesn't inform. The only people that value that stuff, do it themselves. For example Rick.
The real issue, is how this negative media, can change people, and maybe people don't want to raise little Ricks, and think less negative media at the doors step is best. I do.
I never listen to that Rush guy, all he does is make you feel angry, and the only ones I know listen to him are other rednecks that think feeling angry is fine, they are the ones who suffer from all kinds of tension issues.
Well this is a concept, let advertising pay for the media. Well duh!!
The assumption is, the internet is taking away from print, that might be partly true, but print news, gets out of date, is really negative, and the internet has more real time news, so you can't compare the two.
Advertising is what pays, or expected to bring in revenues on most of the sites that make money.
Newspapers have destroyed a lot of lives, they print things, as if guilty before innocent, they have lots of misinformation, no wonder people like think tearing people down is ok,just for the sake of it is ok. He would miss the two minutes of hate, I wouldn't.
The same with banks, they would take your last penny, and do that to people all the time, why should we bail them out. Let them die, they would let us die.
Financial post hosts great contests on the net, they have great prizes, and those companies are getting media exposure.
They must be making money, because they are giving away cash prizes in some of their contests.
The wall street journal is not competitive.
The Journal may be enjoying short-lived pay-per-view online success precisely because of the economic crisis. Good luck with that model when a robust economy returns. As soon as any entity charges for information on the Internet, an entrepreneur will find a new way to provide it at a lower cost. The sheer volume of information on the Internet devalues it. Talk about a socialist threat!
This is a tough nut to crack. I understand why these companies are charging but i am pretty sure they will fail. There is just too much free content to be had to wanna pull out your card.
It's funny. Dick Tofel hasn't been head of Dow Jones corporate communications in years and yet here he is, still defending and promoting that corporation, even though it's been subsumed by News Corp. and produces a paper that bares not the slightest resemblance to the WSJ Tofel says he loved.
Today's WSJ is a quicker read than its predecessor, but a much dumber one, too. There's no insight or behind the scenes info on how things come together or get done.
Mr. Tofel should bemoan the fact that fewer readers can bill their employer to receive the WSJ. If they are paying for it themselves, as I have been, they might notice that Murdoch and friends jacked up the price to $2 a copy, but took out all the information that made the WSJ worth reading every day. Less info for more money? I'll pass, and I suspect many other long time WSJ readers will, too. As for others who might want the new WSJ's quicker, less informative take on things, I'd suggest that both USA Today and the New York Times offer not only a better sports and arts sections, but more news and information to boot.
'Would You Pay to Read This Story?'
Nope. Next!
As the founding editor and later publisher of WSJ.com, I have no question that people will pay for valuable content online, especially if you create a huge bundle of content and features, as we did at The Wall Street Journal Online. But it is worth noting that the bundle of content and services included in a WSJ.com subscription has a value far in excess of what is charged for WSJ.com. It includes the contents of the print Journal (full price over $150/year), plus nearly all of the contents of the real-time Dow Jones Newswires (estimated cost at least $500/year), plus extensive archival research capabilities (Dow Jones Factiva price probably $500/year). Price of WSJ.com: about $100/year.
Translating these economics to other publications that can bundle far less value into a subscription is more challenging.
English grammar ropey in first para after intro, above
' .. its product [singular] .... newspapers may' [plural]
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