Media paywalls – really such a great idea?

This week is a very special week for the industry as the Times and Sunday Times have finally gone live with their paywall. It was meant to happen in May. Then June. It finally came to pass on 2 July and, one amusing upshot has been that none of the staff at News International were given any way to by-pass the paywall, so they have all been having to register their credit card details to access their own site.

And they might well turn out to the only ones who do, since most users of online news are likely to not bother. I mean, why would you? For starters at £1 a day and £2 a week it is very expensive (the newspaper itself costs £1 a day). Also, there is plenty of free, quality news out there on the web, so brand loyalty is likely to go out the window. Couple this with the fact that, had you been a loyal reader of the Times online for many years, the affront that they want to shake the lose change out of your pockets irks somewhat too.

And this is backed up by research too. A study by Sixth Sense finds that UK adults do want to pay for quality journalism, but are more likely to do that in the form of buying a newspaper than pumping cash into the web, which they still see as a free medium.

The fact that the web is still largely free for all other news outlets – and is likely to always be free for BBC news – and that many newspapers, such as the London Evening Standard are also free, means that as Rupert Murdoch tries to charge for content, everyone else is giving it away. And it won’t wash.

The newspaper industry really needs to think again about how it operates. I have absolutely no doubt that they have to charge for content and believe that quality content can carry a fee. But it is all about looking at the platforms available and how consumers use those platforms and THEN looking at how to monetise them.

It’s the old Free-mium model again. Only this time, things like the iPad mean that there is finally a platform the rival good old fashioned paper – and that means that a charge can be levied.

As a news consumer I have no interest in plugging paid for media, but as part of the telemedia industry I do – we need new payment models for content to be developed so that our billing tools can be put in to play. My biggest fear is that the News International experiment, that will end in no one reading the Times online in my view, will put consumers off paying altogether for online news content and we will have lost a huge revenue stream opportunity.