Newsday.com Signs Up 35 Paid Readers — Less Than Two Per Week
Three months after the Dolan family (owners of Cablevision) bought Newsday for $650 million and put the website behind a paid subscription wall, only 35 people have coughed up the $5 per week fee.
Subscribers to the print edition and to Cablevision’s Optimim Cable package can read the site for free, which, as one Newsday reporter put it (via The NY Observer), makes Newsday.com “the freebie newsletter that comes with your HBO.”
Two observations:
One: While it might suggest that publishers can slow the abandonment rate among print subscribers by giving those subscribers more value for the buck (generally a good business practice!), it’s another data point in the argument that paid online news models (NYT, for example) will struggle.
Two: The above model is broken. If news audiences are migrating to digital formats, publishers that — come on, let’s be honest — erect a pay wall around the digital product as a ploy to save print (or cable) subscribers are eating their own children. It’s a tactic to buy more time to figure out digital. But while traditional print publishers are “buying more time,” their competitors (especially the native digital publishers) will win the game. In other words, buying time before you have to deal with your digital strategy is the opposite of what publishers should be doing.