Comments on: Real world “paywall” stats

By: How Blocking Search Engines Can Increase Ad Click-Throughs « The Levisa Lazer

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 12:59:21 +0000

[...] to an average of 2.87 percent today on paid access pages. (You can also view some related data here. It compares paid and free websites of similar [...]

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:23:35 +0000

Our paid site (Fairfield) is located in the county seat. Vacaville (free site) is located only 5 miles away. They are very similar markets, quite a good comparison. City data here: http://www.city-data.com/city/Fairfield-California.html http://www.city-data.com/city/Vacaville-California.html The other two websites we operate are also paid: dailyrepublic.com davisenterprise.com and mtdemocrat.com I only use dailyrepublic.com as the example site as they are more typical. Davis is a University town that does not compare to most markets. And the Mountain Democrat publishes 3 days per week, also not the typical case. Both of the other sites' stats are also available on Quantcast however if you are interested.

By: Shana

Shana — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:52:23 +0000

Hi Joe,

Thank you for sharing this information. As we were reviewing it, a colleague brought up some great thoughts – can you respond?

–I’d be curious to learn more about the differences between the markets the paid and free papers are in, and why given the apparent success of the paid paper both in print and online, all their properties aren’t paid online?

Thank you!

Shana

By: Joe

Joe — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:41:08 +0000

In 2005 we put up the paywall, traffic to the site dropped at first but quickly recovered to previous levels.

In 2007 we blocked search engines from indexing or linking to our site. Since then, our website traffic has doubled.

All the while print circulation is holding and circulation retention expenses are dropping. So I’d have to say our “experiment” has been successful. I’ll elaborate on the REAL benefit our paywall concept in my next post.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:42:01 +0000

Is your paywall experiment working? I hear Murdoch but in a world where the content is instantly copied, distributed and consumed in a very short time (news has a short half life). We face a very different problem. FREE is very compelling of course but the level of audience engagement and interaction our competitors have developed is impressive and clearly helps them. Changing the “print mindset” is difficult and it makes me wonder if it is rooted at least in part in pure structure.

By: Joe

Joe — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:31:36 +0000

Free websites bill everything, including anonymous traffic. No wonder CPM rates are dropping. The more anonymous (google driven) traffic a news site receives, the less value they deliver to the advertiser. (unless the traffic includes some sort of targeting, which most do not)

As a paid site, we sell billable pageviews (BPV’s) which implies that anonymous pageviews are in fact NOT BILLABLE. They are almost useless to the local advertiser. And no we do not use AdSense either, it devalues our premium advertising products.

Billable means we match the pageview (ad impressions) with real people. Not demographics, not profiles, real people in the geographic market the advertiser wants to reach. Not only can we match pageviews to REAL PEOPLE but they are also REAL CUSTOMERS. These people (subscribers) are willing to pay a fair price for goods and services that benefit them and their community.

Take this with a grain of salt, my experience is with small community newspapers, not metros. But it is the real deal, our paywal went up in 2005, and in January 2007 we took it a step further and blocked google (and other aggregators) completely from our content…. Murdoch style.

By: John Bito

John Bito — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:00:06 +0000

For the free site, how are you defining ‘BILLABLE’?