Paywall - History

History

The history of the paywall is one of fluctuation. The first major newspaper to implement a paywall was The Wall Street Journal in 1997, which gained more than 200,000 subscribers in a little over a year. The Wall Street Journal has retained its “hard” paywall since its inception. Despite the presence of the paywall, The Wall Street Journal has remained popular, acquiring over one million users by mid 2007, and 15 million visitors in March 2008. In 2010, following in the footsteps of The Wall Street Journal, The Times implemented a “hard” paywall; a decision which was highly controversial, because unlike The Wall Street Journal, The Times is a general news site, and it was said that rather than paying, users would seek the information for free elsewhere. Following the paywall’s implementation, however, it has been deemed neither a success nor a failure, having recruited 105,000 paying visitors. In contrast, The Guardian has resisted the use of a paywall, citing "a belief in an open internet" and "care in the community" as its reasoning – an explanation found in its welcome article to online news readers who, blocked from The Times’s site following the implementation of their paywall, came to The Guardian for online news. The Guardian has since experimented with other revenue-increasing ventures like open API. Other papers, prominently The New York Times, have oscillated between the implementation and removal of various paywalls. Because online news remains a relatively new medium, experimentation is key to maintaining revenue while keeping online news consumers satisfied. The latest model of paywall has been implemented in Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland by the European company, Piano Media. The company takes advantage of single-language or horizontal markets, using a cable television model to monetize multiple publishers content simultaneously. Piano has nine publishers in Slovakia, eight in Slovenia and seven in Poland all working within their system now. The reader is charged a small fee for access to content.

Some implementations of paywalls proved unsuccessful, and have been removed. Experts who are sceptical of the paywall model include Arianna Huffington, who declared "the paywall is history" in a 2009 article in The Guardian. In 2010, Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia fame) reportedly called The Times's paywall "a foolish experiment." One major concern was with content so widely available, potential subscribers would turn to free sources for their news. The adverse effects of earlier implementations included decline in traffic and poor search engine optimization.

Paywalls have become controversial, with partisans arguing over the effectiveness of paywalls in generating revenue and their effect on media in general. Critics of paywalls include many businessmen, academics such as media professor Jay Rosen, and journalists such as Howard Owens and media analyst Matthew Ingram of GigaOm. Those who see potential in paywalls include investor Warren Buffett, former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Some have changed their opinions of paywalls. Felix Salmon of Reuters was initially an outspoken skeptic of paywalls, but recently expressed the opinion that they could be effective. Renowned NYU media theorist, Clay Shirky, was initially a skeptic of paywalls, but in May 2012, wrote, " should turn to their most loyal readers for income, via a digital subscription service of the sort the " Paywalls are rapidly changing journalism, with an impact on its practice and business model, and on freedom of information on the Internet, that is yet unclear.