In his recent column on Wired (“The Future of Advertising”), Felix Salmon, a wonderful reporter and blogger, especially on economic issues, suggests that he wants to “push back a bit against some of the unexamined assumptions” which he encounters “most of the time when I meet online-media people.” Funny thing is that in examining these assumptions, Salmon reveals some of his own assumptions that are worth examining.
The Boston Globe this week implemented a paywall on their www.bostonglobe.com site, the exclusive outlet for content written for the Boston Globe newspaper. The company delved into two new areas in launching a dedicated site for the Boston Globe. First, they implemented a new design and technical approach called responsive publishing. The concept of responsive publishing is that a website should adapt to any browser, device or window size and still look great. Having browsed the Boston Globe site over the last few days on multiple devices, it definitely lives up to this promise. The site looks great. (Jay Budzik, our CTO, is going to be commenting on the technical approach to responsive publishing, so check back.)
The temptation for news publisher's to paper over revenue holes with the latest and greatest technology solution is all too common. Many have raced from paywalls, to tablets, to mobile and back again. In the face of disruption, it's all too easy to chase a single fix-it rather than look at a multi-revenue tool set to leverage all of the assets in your content library for each audience type.
That was the overarching flow of the conversation during Internet Week in NYC at the Digital Publishing & Advertising Conference panel discussion "Subscriptions, Paywalls and Real Money. Will Users Pay Up or Fade Away?" Perfect Market publishing partner Yoni Greenbaum, Philadelphia Media Network's Vice President and General Manager, Digital was the focus of much of the convesation as he tried to bridge an explanation between the print side of news and the growing digital side.
Leo Kulp, a Citi analyst, recently reported that if The New York Times lost 20% of its website traffic due to its recently implemented paywall, then the company would need to add 107,000 paid subscribers to make up for lost advertising revenues.
Paywalls remain one of the most hotly debated concepts in all of online media. 
In many ways, the great paywall debate can be boiled down to the debate over the value of search users and other non-branded site traffic sources.
Until someone (cough, cough) can prove that search users and alternative traffic sources offer more to a newspapers website than merely a disengaged eyeball, paywall supporters will continue to discount their importance -- the ideological divide will remain, and walls will continue to go up.
Unfortunately, this is a band-aid solution.
I like to think of emails as gifts, every day I approach my inbox filled with excitement for the riches of information that live inside. Some days are disappointing, filled with emails that get deleted within seconds of opening. Others days, I am blessed to discover something thought-provoking, clever and occasionally funny.
An Ari Rosenberg piece in defense of paid content from Media Post falls in the “thought-provoking” category. His title makes his position clear “Rupert’s Right.”
17 November 2011 By Perfect Market
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