Starting next month, The Sun will relax its paywall in an attempt to attract more traffic via social media, says The Guardian. The News U.K. tabloid will make “select digital content” free. The content will initially be general news and sports, written by news teams, but other subject matter and The Sun stories may be added to the mix. Currently, The Sun has a hard paywall, so readers cannot access full stories without subscribing.”Since last summer, we have been working on a cross-departmental project to reimagine The Sun and evolve its business model to take account of rapid changes in technology and the way readers are accessing and sharing news,” said Mike Darcey, chief executive of News U.K.”The guiding principle for the free content will be shareability, helping us to take advantage of the growing trend of readers finding and sharing content on social media, given further impetus by the rapid rise on smartphone use.”According to The Guardian, in November 2014, The Sun had 225,000 paying digital subscribers, just 16 months after putting up its paywall. At this writing, there are several ways to join Sun+, its digital entertainment package that gives members full access to The Sun website and its mobile and tablet apps:
- Get the first month free and pay £7.99 per month after.
- Collect one Paper Perks code printed in The Sun newspaper to get 24 hours of free access to Sun+, and enter 15 codes for a full month’s access.
- Purchase the iPad app from iTunes for £4.99 per month.
- Take advantage of one of The Sun’s Right now a reader can get two months for £1.
From The Sun’s website, it is not clear how readers can subscribe to the print edition or how much that edition costs.Darcey told The Guardian News U.K. can extend The Sun brand by giving offering different entry points for print and digital. At the same time, with a broader reach, The Sun will be more attractive to advertisers. Darcey also said that the free digital presence would be differentiated from the paid product.”We will engage with social media, while avoiding becoming merely a news feed for other aggregator brands. We will also make sure that we execute this shift in a way that provides a net positive contribution to profitability,” Darcey said.Insider Take:The Sun is facing competition with social media platforms like Facebook who are trying to woo companies to publish directly on their sites. To retain market share and promote growth, media outlets like The Sun must experiment with paywalls and content hybrids to find their news niche and identify the tipping point. As more outlets publish their news on Facebook and Twitter, they’ve had to find a way beyond the paywall. The Sun is no different. How can they share their news on social media and protect their brand while still giving offering free content?The Internet is a competitive media market place where a younger generation of news consumers and rapidly evolving technology are game changes. In a study by the Media Insight Project, 40% of Millennials surveyed pay for at least one news-specific service, app or digital subscription. The majority of their news consumption comes from a combination of news sources, including stories posted and shared on social media, not by going directly to the source.The Sun recognizes that it must embrace social media and offer some free content to engage 18 to 34 year olds. Two years after erecting its paywall, The Sun is smartly experimenting with different models to find the perfect mix of digital content that will draw readers in and convert them into paying customers, while also satisfying advertisers who need a broader audience before they’ll invest their digital dollars.We expect that the content and price point testing at The Sun will take time, and changes will be incremental. If The Sun is nimble, it can be successful. We recommend careful data collection and analysis, but also qualitative analysis to really understand their readers and their habits. Ideally, they will take a page from The McClatchy Co.’s book and do some reader analysis before, rather than after, they make significant changes.