Not yet. In May, The Winnipeg Free Press implemented a paywall, allowing readers to pay as they go instead of subscribing. In its second quarter financials, FP Newspapers reports that 1,300 Free Press readers have signed up to pay $0.27 a story so far.
Though the Free press did not reveal how many articles were accessed via the pay-as-you-go model, 1,300 x $0.27 per article is only $351. Even if each reader averaged 10 articles per month, that’s only $3,510 a month in additional revenue.That isn’t going to stretch very far, especially since the pay-as-you-go system allows for refunds. So far, the refunds haven’t been a problem. Though skeptics predicted refunds would be rampant, Christian Panson, vice president for digital content and audience revenue, told NiemanLab that has not been in the case. The refund rate has been less than 1%.”It’s going to take time for people to recognize that they can enter into this agreement with us to read now and pay later and willingly refund,” Panson said. “Like most breaking news sites, or metro newspapers, there’s a lot of stories on our site that might be a paragraph, because the story hasn’t really evolved beyond that. We don’t want people making purchase decisions – we want them to read that one-paragraph story and go ahead and hit the refund button because it’s way too short.”As an alternative to micropayments, readers can subscribe to the newspaper for $12.95 a month, which includes a print subscription as well as unlimited online access. If a reader reads more than 47 stories per month, the print and digital subscription is the better option.So is the read-now-pay-later model working? We think so, but growth will be slow. When the change was launched six weeks ago, the Free Press offered readers a free one-month trial. According to FP Newspapers’ second quarter financials, the Free Press now has 136,000 registered users, with 2,200 being all access digital subscribers, and 1,300 read-now-pay-later customers.NiemanLab says the all access digital subscribers get the Free Press about halfway to its goal of 5,000 subscribers. Panson estimates that it will take the Free Press seven to eight months to get to its goal at its current pace. Another goal is to have 30 to 40% of its subscriber base coming from micropayment customers.According to NiemanLab, Free Press publisher Bob Cox explained his take during a recent quarterly earnings call:”We anticipated an initial bump and then a slow building process. And that’s pretty much in line with what we had anticipated,” Cox said. “…so it’s a big of slogging, but it’s what we expected.”Insider Take:From the beginning, we’ve been impressed with how the Free Press handled the roll-out of its new payment model. From its clever “Key of Bart: Another Kick at a Paywall” to its early announcement of the changes, the Free Press has been transparent about why it needs to change its business model, and about how the changes affect readers. The Free Press offered a 30-day free-trial (staggered to make it easier on their customer service reps), which gave then 136,000 registered users, whose usage they can study and who they can now market to.Their refund policy is user-friendly, making the sign-up risk-free for those who want to try before they buy. The Free Press has also set realistic goals, and we presume it will continue to test and tweak the micropayment model.The micropayment model may not yield a significant amount of revenue up front, but if the Free Press continues to do the right things, we think it will be successful for them – and maybe a model for other North American media outlets to try. ~ Dana E. Neuts for Subscription Insider
