Paywall Round-Up: NYT Falters, WSJ Pounces, SF Chronicle Tumbles, Toronto Star Launches + More

A lot of news for paywalls and metered news sites this week! For starters, The New York Times (along with CNN and TIME) was

A lot of news for paywalls and metered news sites this week!For starters, The New York Times (along with CNN and TIME) was hacked this week by supporters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, through, of all things, paid discovery platform and third-party vendor Outbrain. (Hackers re-directed links to the aforementioned sites to the website of the Syrian Electronic Army.) To Outbrain’s credit, they noticed the problem in 11 minutes and resolved it in seven hours (while this may seem like a long time, I don’t think Outbrain or any content discovery platform expected to be the target of state-sponsored cyber warfare, so I’m willing to give them a wider margin in this case.)However, that hack had nothing to do with NYT’s outage on Thursday morning, which The Wall Street Journal opportunistically pounced on by taking down their own paywall for two hours. (Apparently, news sites are also engaging in a cyber warfare of their own.)Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, The San Francisco Chronicle decided to take down their paywall in the most consumer-confusing way possible. Oddly, they don’t seem inclined to tell current subscribers that content is now free through SFGate.com, and overall there seems to be confusion in both marketing and messaging (customer service has not been alerted to any changes in subscription plans).Nor did The Chronicle give an explanation for why it was dismantling its paywall. I would surmise poor profits, but that would point to a bad practices in onboarding and retention, especially since The Sun was able to retain 64% of its traffic after installing a paywall on August 1. That’s impressive given the fact that its British competitor The Times lost 66% of its market share in a month after it installed a paywall in July of 2010.And in other international news — Canada is now a fully metered news market online after the Toronto Star announced it was putting up a metered paywall. The Star will follow NYT’s lead with 10 free articles in a 30-day time period. This is not the first paid digital product by the Star, but the monthly subscription price of CAD 4.99 is on the lower end, according to this interactive graph from CBC news, which details the monthly subscription rate for 38 Canadian newspapers. The highest monthly subscription rate is CAD 20.

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