Paywalls are reaching higher

Paid content is an enormous issue for publishers and broadcasters. In the past few years, many publishers have erected “paywalls” in order to monetise their content by subscription, either by the article, by package deals with print subscriptions, or long-term online subscriptions. Some strategies are working, particularly the media companies selling business and investment news and information, like the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, and high-quality content like The Economist and The New York Times. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism launched its Digital News report in 2012, showing trends in digital media, including paid content. The Reuters report found that readers in some countries were more likely to pay than others. Readers in Denmark, for example, were far more likely to pay in the last year and last month, compared to their British counterparts. This could be partly due to Danish-only content being seen as valuable for Danish readers, in addition to the push by Danish publishers to create paywalls throughout the newspaper and magazine industry.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.