Why Internet paywalls don’t work

Posted by Patrick Lambert Categories: Corporate News, Editorial,

The web model of free content supported by advertising is now well known and accepted. Yet, some old style corporations, especially in the newspaper industry, would still like to translate their subscriber based services online. That's the case of News Corp., the media giant behind some of UK's biggest newspapers, the Times and the Sunday Times. Recently, they switched from the traditional online model, to moving the entire sites behind paywalls.

There's been a lot of speculation as to how this model would do. The analyst expectations were low, since there's countless free online sites offering the same news reports, so people who don't want to pay could get most of that same content elsewhere. Still, proponents pointed to the commentaries, editorials and other unique content as a way to entice subscribers. Rumors ran wild while this experiment went on.

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Read More | GigaOM

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