If you visit the Star-Herald and are not a subscriber, you will be presented with a notice that you have 13 more stories to read before you will have to subscribe. You have just hit a soft, or metered, paywall. I don’t like paywalls. I circumvent them when I can and stop visiting a site if I can’t. Yet, paywalls are also a fundamental part of my place of employment.
Paywalls restrict the free flow of information. I want the most people possible to see my work. A paywall prevents that from happening. People tell me they would like to read my work, but can’t because they’ve hit the paywall.
Paywalls keep people out. If you keep someone out, they are going to go somewhere else for their news, no matter how loyal they want to be. I can get around every paywall there is, if I really want to. Some are ridiculously easy. Others require some work. Paywalls are not the answer. They are an annoyance.
Major online publications have instituted paywalls only to drop them soon after. They have proven time and again they don’t work.
The Sun newspaper dropped its paywall in October 2015 because it was losing so much traffic to its competitors. Before the paywall, they had 1.9 million visitors each day, Mashable reported. Since dropping the paywall, daily visitors increased 62 percent to 1.3 million. Those numbers not only show people want to read free content, they left in droves when The Sun put up their paywall. They are now beating their three closest competitors every day.
The Times of London saw a 90 percent drop in readers when they had a paywall. Most publications have seen similar drops whenever a paywall is instituted.
In 2014, the Guardian found, “Most publishers with hard paywalls are reporting retention rates as low as 15-20 percent. Retention rates for newspapers using metered paywalls average 58.5 percent, with some reporting as much as 90 percent reader retention.”
The Star-Herald has a soft, or metered paywall.
While paywalls are not the long-term answer for consumers, I understand the need for news organizations to find a way to be monetarily viable. Publishers need to adapt to the changes that meet what their customers want while being able to pay its bills.
Paywalls and gouging customers with costs will only drive them away, causing further decline in readership and revenue. Publishers should build relationships with readers. In 2012, Jeff Jarvis and former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti spoke to GigaOm about readers receiving perks “based on their interaction with a paper, rather than getting penalized for their loyalty by having to pay.”
In September 2015, the Winnipeg Free Press implemented micropayments online. After a reader has viewed their three lifetime articles, they must pay 27 cents per story. They are billed at the end of the month for their usage, up to the $16.99 monthly online subscription fee.
If a story reaches international attention, no one is going to read it. Instead, it will be cut and pasted someplace else for free.
There is one neat thing about this system. Readers have a chance to opt out of paying for articles they didn’t think were worth the price by clicking a button to explain why, The Guardian said.
As newspapers and online media around the world continue to slash costs and employees to stay afloat, they also have to find a way to keep readers like myself who increasingly stop reading their websites because of paywall limitations or micropayments.
I am happy to pay for content if I feel it’s worthwhile. Media organizations charge too much for what I can afford, some more than their print subscription. I was an early adopter of Reddit Gold, which helps support the site, because Reddit gives me value. I can tailor what I want to read about and have found many interesting stories that I never would have stumbled upon myself.
For me, site aggregators, like Reddit or Flipboard are a better option. Blendle has taken a new approach to reading online. Payment at Blendle is established by the original publisher of the content, ranging from about seven to 28 cents; 30 percent of the revenue went to Blendle, the rest to the publisher, the Guardian reported.
“Payment was automatically taken from the reader’s account, but if, having reached the end of a story, the reader felt short-changed an immediate refund could be claimed. On this basis Blendle has established 500,000 regular users in Holland and Germany.”
Blende founder Alexander Klöpping launched in the U.S. with major publications on board. They signed up more than 10,000 users their first week.
I don’t visit one site for my news. I regularly read more than two dozen each day. I can’t afford to pay for all of them. I already use Reddit and Flipboard. Blendle is something I might consider, if they can work out a cheaper payment plan.