Full FeedWall Street Journal to launch micropayment model
The Wall Street Journal, in a bid to survive the growing shift of newspaper readership from print to online, has announced it will implement a new micropayment subscription model on its website.
Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told The Financial Times that “a sophisticated micropayments service” will launch this autumn. The system would charge small fees to occasional users who may not be willing to pay more than $100 a year for a subscription to WSJ.com, Thomson said.
The WSJ is not the first paper to try and maximize its online profits. In February, Newsday announced it will soon start charging for access to its online content. With print newspapers struggling to survive amid sinking ad revenue and dropping readership, expect more and more of them to start experimenting with online revenue ideas. These days more and more people go online for their news and it makes sense for the papers to do what they can to profit from it.
I think this model could really work well for them. Many people who aren’t willing to pay the steep cost of an online subscription to the paper would probably have no problem paying a small fee to access an article that interests them. This could be especially popular with students and others who do a lot of research. The only question is just what the fees will be.
What are your thoughts? Would you be okay with a micropayment model for your local/favorite paper? Why or why not?
Read [Cnet]
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Would I be okay with a micropayment model for your local/favorite paper? Not really, but it’s not a big deal.
With the sheer volume of coverage and the abundance of news sources out there nowadays, I can simply use the search engine of my choice and find a free story from another source. I don’t see that option going away in the near future.
on May 11, 2009 at 08:13 PM - LINKI second Mike’s opinion.
Furthermore, let me get this straight, “With print newspapers struggling to survive amid sinking ad revenue and dropping readership…”. The question we should be asking is WHY are print newspapers seeing a decline in readership? Perhaps because they’re charging for a service that is readily available online, in a searchable, interactive, achiveable, oh, and did I mention (mostly) free? Now Murdoch wants to drop even more payments on readers? FAIL.
on May 12, 2009 at 07:59 AM - LINKNot to mention that micropayments would be a horrible deal for journalists and journalism. Since publishers could measure the profitability of individual articles, they would expect each article to earn its keep, which would in turn hasten the tabloidization of content.
More thoughts here: http://thedigitalists.com/2009/05/12/what-would-micropayments-mean-for-journalists/
on May 12, 2009 at 11:16 PM - LINK