Scaling the Paywall – Thoughts from TMB’s Paywall Strategies

Last week The Media Briefing launched its first conference in London. This saw 150 senior decision-makers at publishers of all sizes take a one-day intensive to look at various topics linking the monetisation of content and communities. We were there to learn and engage, and below you will find the obligatory write-up of what was really a great event.

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Charging for content or access?

There’s been a lot of debate on how publishers can get users to pay for content, but it’s starting to look like this might be the wrong question to ask at all! There’s ample reason to see how it’s not so much the quality or quantity of content that should have a price tag looming over it, but more the access to content itself. We now have ‘access points’  where whole databases of content are generated that not only are convenient, but get better and faster all the time. A prime example is Netflix which James McQuivey blogged about, as it’s a one-stop digital archive that hosts tons of content of different media formats in a sole access site. Isn’t that the main death knell threat for newspapers, DVDs, magazines etc? It’s understandable then that access to content is what programmers and publishers alike should be looking at more closely. Read more →

Will paid content work? You can’t fall off the floor.

After the secretive meeting of newspaper executives a few weeks ago, at which the economic future of the industry was discussed in depth (see my thoughts here), there has been a splurge of coverage about the companies that are positioning themselves as the newspapers’ saviour.

The Guardian recently reviewed the startup ecosystem that is forming around providing paid-content revenue streams to newspapers, which is worth a read. But to go beyond the startups mentioned there, I have created a summary of the various approaches.

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Mobile Industry Review Blog goes subscription only, charges £12,000 per year

Yesterday leading mobile blog Mobile Industry Review announced it is to stop providing it’s content for free to readers and instead charge for access.

One company has bought our entire output exclusively, on-going. We are, in effect, becoming a private research company.

Our new client is unwilling to subsidise our existing audience of readers (300-400k last month) so the content that we’ll be creating — reports, video interviews and day-to-day industry news and analysis — will become proprietary from 27th of March. After this date, the public version of MIR will no longer be updated.

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