[LINK] News Corp paywalls

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

News Corp. To Put Australian Papers Behind Paywalls 

By Ross Kelly, Ross.Kelly at dowjones.com 
<http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110606-713878.html>


SYDNEY. News Corp.'s Australian unit announced details Tuesday of plans 
to put its domestic newspapers behind online paywalls as it seeks to 
extract more revenue from readers searching for news on the web. 

>From October, national broadsheet newspaper The Australian will go to 
a "freemium" model for its news--offering free basic stories but charging 
for premium content such as features. 

Online access will start at 2.95 Australian dollars a week, said Richard 
Freudenstein, chief executive of News Ltd.'s digital business and The 
Australian. 

"A lot of The Australian's content is unique and is of value to its 
readers," Freudenstein told a conference in Sydney. 

News Ltd.'s tabloid publications including Melbourne's Herald Sun and 
Sydney's Daily Telegraph will adopt similar models at a later date, a 
company spokesman said without providing more detail. 

Faced with a tougher market and the free availability of news via online 
search engines, The Australian is following other News Corp. print titles 
such as The Times of London by implementing an online paid content 
strategy. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street 
Journal, which already charge for online content. 

Freudenstein declined to estimate how many online subscribers News Ltd. 
will attract but said it was "pleasantly surprised" by market research 
indicating how many people would be prepared to pay. 

Fairfax Media Ltd. which publishes the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 
hasn't said when, or if, it plans to charge online for its major 
broadsheets. Fairfax already charges online for premium business content 
in the Australian Financial Review. 

"We're not expecting to lose huge amounts of traffic. We could certainly 
afford to lose some traffic and still maintain our advertising revenue," 
Freudenstein said. 

New York Times Co. said last month that its push to charge the online 
readers of its flagship newspaper is faring better than expected, with 
more than 100,000 people having paid for online access since it began 
charging readers three weeks earlier. 

Although The Times of London experienced a sharp decline in web traffic 
when its paywall went up last year, Freudenstein said it's making more 
money from its 79,000 digital subscribers than it did from the 20 million 
unique browsers it used to have. 

The News Ltd. spokesman decline to say how much revenue it's Australian 
newspapers generate each year. Operating income from News Corp.'s global 
newspapers and information services division in the year to June 30, 2010 
of US$530 million accounted for about 13% of group income. 
--

Cheers,
Stephen