Newsday Drops Its Paywall For 'At Least One Month'
from the but-paywalls-work-great,-right? dept
Remember how excited Cablevision was about putting up that paywall for Newsday, the newspaper that it owned? While the company claimed that the purpose of the paywall was really all about keeping Cablevision customers from deserting in favor of Verizon, it was still rather stunning to find out after three months, the company had secured a grand total of 35 paywall subscribers who weren’t just grandfathered in as Cablevision TV subscribers. More recently it also came out that ad revenues for the paper had dropped off significantly as well, in part because of the much, much smaller audience. So it’s interesting to note (via Romenesko) that Newsday has miraculously decided to drop its paywall “for at least a month.” Seems like a pretty clear admission of failure.
Filed Under: journalism, newsday, paywalls
Companies: cablevision
Comments on “Newsday Drops Its Paywall For 'At Least One Month'”
awwww
who needs them anyhow. please put back up and stay until your dead.
>Seems like a pretty clear admission of failure.
For at least a month they are admitting failure.
Or...
Or maybe it was so successful, they don’t need money anymore and can just give it away for free!
Paywalls in themselves are not ALL going to fail
The problem is companies have not figured out that they need to offer ORIGINAL content at a small price to build a fan base.
These idiots continue putting walls up with little original materials, bad sites, and high prices. It is an absolute joke.
I pay for a site that gives me specific news about a specific topic. I enjoy it and have no problem paying the price that I do.
Re: Re:
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Pay walls aren’t necessarily a bad idea if what you offer behind the wall is worth paying for. Obviously you still need to make sure people know what’s behind the wall in the first place to entice them to pay.
The problem with the current crop of pay walls is they are from crap, generic news outlets that offer nothing over the hundreds of other crap, generic news outlets offer.
Re: Re:
yep it works for porn sites. kinda.
Remember !!!! how could I forget,, WHAT A DAY !!!..
Remember how excited Cablevision was about putting up that paywall for Newsday, the newspaper that it owned?
OH yea, I remember, WHAT A DAY, did we party on that day, I will NEVER forget that day,, it was just a MAJOR event, right up there with the FJK assasination, and with 9/11..
Mike, how could I not remeber such an amazing day as that day,, I will never forget it.. it will go down in history as one of those greats..
(Gee Mike, most people remember things that are actualy usefull, important, or that affects yourself, perhaps you need a defrag, free up some storage space, so you can put actual facts and real information there. Maybe you can fill it with economics, society, commerce and how the world actually works, remembering when some dude did something that has nothing to do with you is a waste of ability, and you dont have ability to waste.. )
Re: Remember !!!! how could I forget,, WHAT A DAY !!!..
Well, I remember it.
Re: Remember !!!! how could I forget,, WHAT A DAY !!!..
How’s those sour grapes tasting?
Re: Remember !!!! how could I forget,, WHAT A DAY !!!..
Seriously, Darryl? Your trolling has been reduced to that? I suppose it’s easier than getting every fact wrong, though.
for life
I don’t need that anyways…they should drop it for life…
Lost Eyeballs
The paywall has probably already done the damage. In three months, faithful readers who would rather not pay probably found another online news source, changed their news feeds, and will never know that Newsday is free again. If they do find out that Newsday is paywall-less, they probably won’t bother switching back…especially if it may only be for one month. Smart marketing move!
This make me curious about rupert murdochs experiment in paywalls … I have a running bet here at Techdirt I need to pay.
newsday under paywall
i do remember that day, biggest think i noticed immediately was the quantity of comments posted by readers dropped to almost zero. articles which would have had over 200 comments would have 5 or 6. and they also started rabidly controlling and limiting which articles even allowed comments.
Paywall
oh look at that. paywall back up. guess it works afterall.