Johnston Press’s pay wall falls over..
March 31st, 2010 by Jason Roe. Post is filed under Business, Technology.
Days after my blog post “Pay walls going up for Irish traditional media“, the very people who inspired confidence in pay walls for online regional new publishers are now taking them right back down again. I hate to tell you I told you so, but ..
pressgazette.co.uk reports that Johnston Press halts pay wall experiment:
Johnston Press is to drop the paywalls it implemented on a number of its local newspapers from next week, Press Gazette understands
The regional publisher erected barriers on two of its Scottish and four of its English weekly newspaper websites in November as part of a trial to “get an understanding of what the customer dynamic is around paid-for content”.
Also check out Frank Prendergast’s, Paywalls are not the Enemy blog post. Its an interesting read.
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March 31st, 2010 at 2:15 pm
It’s a shame they’re not ready to make a public comment, particularly since the trial was only scheduled for three months – I get that two of the publications appear to have ended the trial early, but without comment it’s hard to draw substantive conclusions.
Here’s another interesting look at the negative effects of paywalls, Salon.com’s thoughts on their paywall experience.
However I do think that all paywall experiences will improve if the large organisations put their paywalls back up thereby making paywalls more acceptable. It makes it very difficult for regional publications to charge when so many large media brands are free.