Journalism Online Examines Pay Model - Jeremy W Peters

While newspapers around the world are anxiously asking themselves what would happen if they started charging readers to view articles online, a few answers have started to emerge.

Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise.

The sample size of Journalism Online’s data was small — about two dozen mostly small- and medium-size papers that had been charging readers for several months — so divining any potential pattern for large newspapers is difficult.

But the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected.

Journalism Online said monthly unique visits to the Web sites included in its study fell zero to 7 percent, while page views fell zero to 20 percent. No publishers reported a decline in advertising revenue.

Unlike a strict pay wall — which requires a subscription to view almost all editorial content — a model like the one Journalism Online employed does not choke off huge amounts of Web traffic.

And, obviously, someone who wants to read a lot of stories at the NY Times, for example, is likely to be willing to pay for the service. This is the freemium model, once again.