SERRAVAL, France — Newspapers, once reluctant to try to charge readers for access to their Web sites, have begun doing so in droves.
Across many of the developed economies of America, Europe and Asia, so-called pay walls are proliferating as publishers struggle to make up for dwindling revenue on their print products. Online advertising, once seen as the great hope for the future, has begun leveling off, which is accelerating the push for new Internet business models.
“Why now?” said Douglas McCabe, an analyst at Enders Analysis in London. “The outlook for digital advertising for all but the very largest sites looks increasingly challenging. Therefore, it is critical that news services experiment with subscription models.”
The trend has taken in some longtime holdouts, like The Washington Post, which said in March that it would start charging online readers this summer. Elsewhere in the United States, The San Francisco Chronicle also recently announced plans to start digital subscriptions, and the total number of American newspapers with pay walls has climbed to more than 300.
In Europe, the recent conversion has been even more striking. Last week, the Telegraph Media Group, publisher of the biggest broadsheet in Britain, said it would start charging British domestic readers for access, having previously introduced a pay wall for its international audience. The biggest tabloid in Britain, The Sun, also confirmed plans to erect a pay wall.
Last month in Switzerland, Tages-Anzeiger, the largest-circulation quality daily in the German-speaking part of the country, announced plans to switch to a paid online model, joining its main rival, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which did so last year.
In Germany, Schwäbisches Tagblatt became the 35th newspaper to introduce a pay wall. Among the leading national dailies, Die Welt started charging online readers recently, and Bild plans to do so this summer. Other German publishers have said they are weighing the move.
“There’s hardly anyone left who is resisting the trend,” said Tobias Fröhlich, a spokesman for Axel Springer, which publishes both papers.
In Asia, too, pay walls are popping up, with publications like the Asahi Shimbun and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun in Japan and The Straits Times of Singapore embracing digital payment plans.
The new round of pay wall adoption could test some long-held assumptions about online fees. In Britain, for example, the conventional wisdom used to be that it would be impossible for newspapers to persuade readers to pay for general news online; while one British newspaper, The Financial Times, was a pay wall pioneer, some analysts attributed its success to its specialized business content and the fact that many of its customers pay for their subscriptions via corporate expense accounts.
Certain particularities of the British market make the transition harder for general newspapers in Britain than elsewhere. One is a high rate of newsstand sales rather than home delivery, which predominates in the United States and Germany. It is easier to market new services, like paid online access, to existing subscribers than to anonymous customers at a newsstand.
British tabloids have also had to confront questions about their credibility since the phone-hacking scandal, which resulted in the shutdown of The News of the World, a sibling to The Sun in News Corporation’s stable.
The popularity of the BBC’s news Web site, which is required to be free in Britain, is a further hurdle for rival online publishers. Yet after the latest round of pay wall adoption, only two prominent national British dailies, The Guardian and The Daily Mail, will be available free on the Web.
Another notion that is about to be put to the test is the industry belief that tabloid newspapers, specializing in celebrity gossip and other news with a short shelf life and aimed at lower-income readers than broadsheets, might have an especially hard time persuading readers to pay for digital editions. Now the two highest-circulation newspapers in Europe, Bild — a tabloid in content despite its broadsheet format — and The Sun, are about to find out.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/business/media/more-newspapers-are-making-web-readers-pay.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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