Due to declining advertising revenues, many newspapers are beginning to put up paywalls around their online content as a way to ensure they remain profitable.
The Montreal Gazzette, Globe and Mail, and newspapers owned by Postmedia Network Canada Corp., such as The National Post, already have their paywalls in effect. The Toronto Star announced in October that it will implement them in early 2013.
These Canadian papers join the likes of American papers The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and British newspaper The Times who have implemented paywalls in recent years.
The above Canadian papers hope that paywalls will allow them to drastically cut their losses. Postmedia lost $28 million in the fourth quarter of this year. While The Toronto Star’s owners Torstar Corp. actually ran a $35 million profit they remain concerned about the declining print advertising market. Online advertising has not proved to be an adequate replacement of the money lost in print advertising.
Paywalls have been hugely successful for The New York Times, which hosts 500,000 paid online subscribers, but some fear that Canadian papers’ lack of presence in the international market will hurt their chances of replicating this success.
In a conversation I had with Arthur writer Anthony P Gulston he asked rhetorically “when a newspaper goes online is it not then a blog?” The very word “newspaper” points toward a physical medium that has very little to do with the Internet. It seems the distinction between newspaper and blog are blurred when a newspaper goes online.
However, most blogs can be accessed without limits, free of charge. Perhaps paywalls are what will distinguish the two. Some are understandably less than enthused about this being the defining mark.
A blogger who asked to be referred to by his online alias “Cin Wicked” tells Arthur that newspapers need to be careful with how they implement these paywalls. “I generally find that if you’re going to be charging for access to a website you should be offering some kind of premium service, like the removal of the ads, additional articles, or access to the backlog of the newspaper. […] There has to be some kind of perk.”
The most important difference between blogs and newspapers in that respect is newspapers are only offering 10 to 15 free articles per month, while blogs tend to offer unlimited access for all, saving the additional “premium” content for those who pay.
The Globe and Mail gives no word on their website as to whether paying for a subscription will remove ads for users, but they do offer subscriber-only content and access to “exclusive subscriber loyalty events, shows, concerts and pre-sale tickets” … provided you live in either Ontario or BC.
Another criticism of this move is that it excludes those who would be unable to afford a subscription to a newspaper-it privatizes information. Postmedia papers charge a regular rate of $7.95 per month per paper, while The Globe and Mail charges $19.99 for its unlimited package. The Toronto Star has not yet indicated its pricing. In any case, it will be more expensive than the free content these sites once provided.
Despite this there are various ways around having to pay, assuming you want to stick with one of the above papers. The first is rather traditional-read the physical newspaper. Of course if you want your own copy you’ll have to pay for one, but Cin Wicked tells Arthur to get his news, “I go into the Whistle Stop and buy a pot of tea and read the newspaper.” Many businesses have copies available for public browsing. Libraries, such as Trent’s, have free, shared copies available as well.
Another way around it is as simple as careful use of your browser. An anonymous source says that in order to track how many articles a free user has read “they save a cookie on your browser … just turn on private browsing!”
Private browsing allows users to go visit any site on the web without those sites permanently saving cookies. Every up-to- date browser has this functionality.
I tested this advice and found that I was able to read article number 11 on The Globe and Mail’s website (they only allow free users ten) by simply restarting my browser and opening it in private browsing mode again. The cookie is destroyed the second the browser is closed, so you can access all the content you want, ten articles at a time.
If you forget to do this and read ten articles, simply locate and delete the cookie in your browser’s cookie files. Or use a different browser without that cookie saved on it. Both this anonymous source and Cin Wicked express concerns that a system so easy to get around is destined to fail.
The math is simply not there, either. If Postmedia is charging only $7.95 per month for access, even if they replicate the success of The New York Times and gain 500,000 users that’s only going to be an additional $16-million revenue per quarter, still $12-million below last quarter’s losses.
Only time will tell how effective paywalls actually are as a revenue-generating tactic. Keep checking Arthur for up-to- date information on the issue and, rest assured, Arthur’s website will always be free to access.
