Lets say news.com has 200,000 monthly pageviews. We don’t sell online advertising by the number of uniques, so uniques don’t matter in this example. News.com is able to change an aggressive $12 CPM on the impressions, and they run 3 ads per page. (many community papers get 5-7 CPM)
200 * 12 * 3 = $7,200 per month
Pre-print advertisers pay a premium to have their inserts delivered to specific geographic regions, on specific days. In print we call this “zoning.” By adding the paywall we can ZONE online ads and command a premium $25/CPM (or more).
200 * 25 * 3 = 15,000 per month
In order to determine how much traffic you might loose lose, look at the google search terms. Google used to provide 30% of our traffic, which could in theory equal a 30% drop in traffic. (-$4500 per month ouch)
However, when you look at the search terms you see that most of the search traffic is:
newspaper.com
News Paper
Town Newspaper
etc.
Very generic terms, very few searches come from individual stories. In fact the number was 7.1% That’s the google traffic we lost from blocking the google-bot.
Now the upside… Traffic did take a 25% hit, from readers as they learned to use the pay-site and come to terms with paying for access to our community. But over the course of two years users have learned that if they want to know what’s happening in our town, they have to come to our site. Our traffic has actually doubled in two years since blocking google/RSS.
The reason why? Users have to come to our site to find the headlines. They must click on LOCAL NEWS to see the full run down on the goings on around town. And that behavior is PRECISELY why we can charge a premium for local advertising. Our readers want to feel included in the community. They are NOT just reading content. They skim the story list to see what’s going on, to stay connected.
The PAYWALL is not about CONTENT, never was. It’s about access to a community.
January 25th, 2010 at 11:40 am Vote:
“In order to determine how much traffic you might loose…”
That would be “lose.”