Wall Street Journal plans micropayments model
The Wall Street Journal is expected to begin charging nonsubscribers micropayments for access to individual articles, according to a report Sunday in The Financial Times.
Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told The Financial Times that "a sophisticated micropayments service" will launch this autumn. The system would charge small fees to occasional users who may not be willing to pay more than $100 a year for a subscription to WSJ.com, Thomson said.
The Journal is one of the few large daily newspapers still managing to charge for online content. The New York Times abandoned a two-year experiment with the Web-subscription model in 2007, suggesting that the company's projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.
Word of the payment model emerges as the newspaper industry is undergoing a dramatic contraction. As readers have increasingly gone online for their news, newspapers have suffered declining subscriber numbers and lower advertising revenue. Many newspapers have cut jobs, and some have warned that they may face closure soon if they can't make further cuts or find buyers for their operations.
That climate has publishers scrambling for new revenue models. New York newspaper Newsday announced in February that it plans to begin charging online readers for access to its content.
Publishers are also taking aim at search engines and news aggregators. Last week, Google defended itself on charges that it is profiting from content produced by newspaper executives, magazine publishers, and the Associated Press.
During a Senate hearing, Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said, "Google News and Google search provide a valuable free service to online newspapers specifically by sending interested readers to their sites at a rate of more than 1 billion clicks per month. Newspapers use that Web traffic to increase their readership and generate additional revenue."
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. Before joining CNET News in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers. E-mail Steven. 
Charging micropayments is just going to make people get their news elsewhere.
"Oh you want to read about the school bus flipping off the road and into a freeway you'll need to pay $1"
While most news sources couldn't realistically get anyone to pay for their stories (largely because they are simply syndicating news from somebody else) some news sources that write good and unique content like the WSJ can get people to pay for the content. The WSJ has been successfully doing it for years. The real question isn't whether you can get people to pay for content, but rather whether micropayment systems can succeed.
About the only thing people at this time are willing to give for access to such information is their email address, and that only sometimes,
US$6.95/month is actually a bargain, because that's the cost of two high-end Starbucks coffees.
let's say average CPM on WSJ.com is $35, what do you think average page goes for in paper?
As for companies like CNET have been doing it for years, how many of those years has CNET been in the black?
And remember for a long time CNET had a print division because it made money, remember Computer Shopper magazine?
As a matter of fact, why doesn't the Newspaper industry get together to create credits that can be used across ALL print media sites. It will increase the value of credits if they could be spent on ANY site, rather than restricting them to a single site and requiring the purchase of additional credits for every news site you access.
~DON
http://www.DonTheIdeaGuy.com
- by bennetts77833 May 15, 2009 7:47 AM PDT
- I Started my WSJ subscription at $49/year when it was first offered. Great value good product that has improved over the last six or so years. But WSJ publishers have continually raised prices and added products I did not want like Barrons so at the $80 a year price point, for a year I discontinued my subscription. They offered me a deal to resubscribe for $80 after that year with a $20 Amazon coupon which got me a reasonable price; but at a $100 per year now, it will be nice to see a micro payments option. I don't use much of their content (sports?, wine reviews, stock quotes etc.) and for me, the subscription is not tax deductible as the publishers assume. so I hope their micro payments system will be reasonable. I'm retired now and on a reduced income (that's not low, just lower) $100 for one publication and $40/mo ($480 a year for TV, shameful for cable or satellite tv) and makes me interested in micro payments there too!
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