While publishers are still searching for a consensus on charging for digital content, there are some encouraging signs for those who have already taken the decision to put content behind a paywall.
A few months ago we helped Britain’s biggest-selling evening paper, the Express & Star and its sister publication the Shropshire Star, put some of its content behind a paywall, using our digital content management and publishing system, Knowledge, which manages content production for print, web, tablet and smart phone.
The Times and Sunday Times recently announced that it was up to 100,000 paying customers on their websites and other major news organisations are heading down the paid-for route.
What counts here in revenue terms, of course, is whether the sites are making as much from subscribers as they were from advertising when they were free to view.
The suggestion is they are – more in fact – and the numbers are growing steadily month on month.
Others are not so keen on charging for content, online at least – but they’re reaping rewards in other ways. The Mail Online is reported to have topped more than 77miillion unique browsers in May, making it by far the biggest UK publisher online and possibly pushing the BBC into second place at home and challenging the New York Times worldwide.
Figures for the Guardian, Telegraph and Independent were all up for the same period, too.
The Mail does charge a subscription for its iPad app after an initial trial period and the numbers seem to be holding up there, too.
As yet, though, nobody really seems to have settled on a definitive payment model with publishers still exploring a range of revenue opportunities, from joint print and digital subscriptions to digital only to part free/part paid-for.
Another unknown is the likely effect of news sales aggregators like Zinio and the forthcoming Apple Newsstand one-stop-shop, which will perform a role not unlike a high street newsagent in offering a number of titles under one digital roof, as it were.
Although this sort of arrangement should make subscription easier for the subscriber, it will still mean publishers conceding a fair slice of their revenue to Apple.
The arrival of the Financial Times’s HTML5-based digital publication presents an opportunity for publishers to try pushing their own model particularly if it was allied to the sort of digital subscription piece we offer through our NCS product.
Web apps through HTML5 are something we’re keen to embrace, partly for that reason, but mainly because it gives us the chance to offer publishers an even easier route to digital publishing – with or without print – that will maintain the look and feel of a brand across multiple digital platforms.
Other ideas include charging only for specialised, long-form journalism or collections of historical or subject-specific material, and there’s even a model which attempts to give individual articles a market price and charges on the number of times the story’s read.
Interestingly, we might have a web app for that, too...
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