An award-winning regional daily has introduced a metered paywall as a way of “placing value” on its stories.
The Courier, Dundee – the reigning Regional Daily Newspaper of the Year – announced the move days after national daily The Telegraph abandoned a similar experiment.
It will allow readers access to three articles per month on its website before they are asked to register their details.
They will then be allowed to see a further seven stories before the paywall is activated. A similar paywall is used by the site of the Courier’s DC Thomson sister daily The Press & Journal, which is based in Aberdeen.
Courier editor Richard Neville, pictured above left, said: “The website has been designed to offer our readers instant access to news from their area, as and when they want it.
“The paid-for platform will provide exclusive content as it enables our editorial team to give updates on news stories as they break and develop.
“The subscription paywall helps us, like many publishers, to diversify our revenue streams. We are placing value on our editorial content and we believe users will be prepared to pay for this.”
The move comes two months after the newspaper celebrated its 200th anniversary.
Kirsten Morrison, DC Thomson’s head of digital, said: “The Courier’s decision to implement a paywall is multi-faceted but is primarily focused on delivering a better user experience.
“Capturing what our users are consuming on site, and appending that to an email address, means we can deliver web and email personalisation to give our readers a better digital experience across our publishing network.”
As well as the Daily Telegraph, The Sun has also abandoned its metered paywall.
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Good luck with that. Two words: Won’t work.
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Best of luck to them. Good journalism needs to be paid for or else it’s just blogging.
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Good luck indeed. I hope the courier isn’t full off listicles and other clickbait masquerading as news because I doubt anyone will pay to read rubbish like that. On a financial note, I wonder if paywall revenue will shore up any losses from reduced digital advertising click through revenue?
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I predict the paywall will fall within a year. Newspaper groups keep on trying but as others have said they do not work, unless you are the FT.
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Would be nice to know what the advertisers think of this “better user experience”.
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“A better user experience.” where do they get these people from. Good luck though. It is time newspapers stopped giving away good stories, though this might not work because people are used to something for nothing.
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Cannae work. In Dundeee (para 2), like everywhere else, internet news fans expect to feed their habit for freee…
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A paywall is a good solution but only if the content is of sufficient quality and in depth enough for people to pay for it.
News, like any other commodity, is only of value of enough people are prepared to invest money to access the goods, if not it’s chasing shadows: tipping a wink to the idea but lacking the substance to monetise it and make it a viable business proposition however I assume all the research has been done to establish abig enough market to warrant the launch?
Good luck in your endeavours though
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It’ll be good if it works.
Can that jumper/ cardigan be put behind a paywall too??? Nobody needs to see that!
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Och, they spoiled ma weee joke about Dundeee by knocking off that third e.
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I don’t understand why publishers persist with paywalls. The bottom line is that they will instantly lose at least 90 per cent of their online audience.
This is where I usually hear the cries of ‘it’s better to have 10,000 people paying £2 per month, than 100,000 paying nothing’. To which I reply, ‘not if it results in more than £20,000 of lost advertising revenue per month… which it inevitably will!’
The financials for paywalls just don’t add up with the exception of a few national niches, such as the FT.
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