Near the end of January, in the newsroom at Newsday, the Long Island daily paper serving 377,000 subscribers, a reporter asked a question of his publisher. Three months prior, the company established a pay-wall on its Web site, newsday.com. The reporter wanted to know how many people ponied up the $260 annual fee for total access.
The publisher, Terry Jimenez, didn’t know, so he asked someone who did. The answer was 35. Thirty-five people had signed up for the online service.
To clarify, Newsday is owned by Cablevision, a cable television company that also provides cable internet. Anyone who subscribes to Cablevision’s broadband internet also receives total access to newsday.com. Additionally, anyone who receives the print version of Newsday also has access to the Web site.
Bloggers were quick to make note of the low pickup rate. “Newsday’s Pay Wall Experiment Yields Disappointing Results,” read Drew Grant’s headline on the FishbowlNY blog. “No matter how you try to sugarcoat it, trying to make people pay for online news content isn’t easy,” Grant wrote.
http://mentalmunition.blogspot.com/2010/02/thirty-five-is-greater-than-zero-but.html
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