Items tagged with paywall
Last year, multiple news companies began hopping on the digital subscription bandwagon courtesy of the iPad. The hope was that Apple's 9.7" behemoth would drive a new wave of people to sign up for tablet versions of their favorite news media (paper subscribers were often, but not always, given access to the digital edition for free). After years of losses, traditional print media were desperate to find a replacement engine for plummeting advertising revenue. It hasn't worked. The Pew Research Center has released data showing that while digital advertising with newspapers increased by $207 million in 2011, print advertising fell by more than 10x that amount, to $2.1B. The 10:1 offset is worse...
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It's pretty easy it was to get around the New York Times' newly erected paywall, and now there's a free Chrome browser extension that does exactly the same thing for the Wall Street Journal. The extension, "Read WSJ Extension," has been labeled as a way to "cheat" the Wall Street Journal, but we're not quite so hyperbolic in our view. The reason is because it's always been easy to get around the WSJ paywall. Since arrivals at the WSJ that are directed to the site via search engines like Google skip through the paywall just fine, a simple search on the WSJ article title usually works. Still, this is a much easier solution. How does it work? Exactly as above. If you click on a "locked" WSJ...
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One of the most significant impacts of the iPad (and of tablets more generally) has been the devices' perceived ability to alleviate the crushing financial woes currently afflicting most major newspapers and magazines. The general theory is that customers, who are used to reading web content for free, will pay a monthly charge for the privilege of reading content through an application. The New York Times has been working on its own paywall and has released some preliminary information on what the various services will cost. For now, at least, free service isn't going away. The Gray Lady will allow occasional readers to view a certain number of pages per month and has vowed that readers arriving...
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