January 18, 2011
Premium content: What the Waco Tribune-Herald has learned so far
A Texas newspaper organization offers free online content, including breaking news and obituaries, and requires paid subscriptions for access to more in depth work. Four months in, editor Carlos Sanchez says it’s too soon to pinpoint trends but so far the company has seen a drop in Web traffic and an increase in print subscriptions. Public reaction has been evenly mixed between approving and critical, Sanchez says.
Dubious as I am that news sites will be able to effectively implement pay walls on any scale, I do think online subscriptions might work in certain conditions and in certain markets. So it’s important to look at specific attempts with an open mind. I’ve been curious about the Waco Tribune-Herald‘s four-month-old effort in particular because editor Carlos Sanchez worked on the idea as a fellow at KDMC’s News Leadership program in 2009. Under the program, print subscribers pay $15.45 a month, with online access included, while online-only subscribers pay $9.95.)
I checked in with Carlos Sanchez last week to see how it’s going. Here’s an edited Q&A based on our exchange of e-mails.
Q. How do you decide what content is for online subscribers only?
Our strategy from the beginning was to keep things as simple as possible. Generally, if it’s a wire story that is available at other websites, it’s free; if it is something locally produced, it’s behind a pay wall.
There are broad exceptions: staff written blogs, breaking news and, most important, obituaries (are free). Our thinking behind the blogs was that our reporters could offer more of a social media feel, with links to content behind the pay wall. Ideally, it would replicate the kind of banter that we hear every day in a newsroom in which the story behind the story becomes just as fascinating as the story itself.
Initially, we put breaking news behind the pay wall, but as we grew more aggressive in using social media as an outreach tool for breaking news, the focus of our social posts shifted quickly from the news to reader outrage that we were recommending link that was behind a pay wall. Because of that, we shifted our strategy and put breaking news in front of the pay wall, believing that we can offer the quick update for free, but make the reader pay for the depth that only a newspaper can provide.
For obituaries, we kept them free on the advice of several other newspapers who have erected pay walls and who have said their biggest regret is putting obits behind a pay wall. On a daily basis, they said, that was their single greatest complaint from people visiting their sites.
Q. How many online paid subscribers do you have and how much revenue does that generate?
While those numbers are confidential, I can tell you that our business strategy follows that of Little Rock: all of our 7-day-a-week print subscribers get access to our online content for free. Others have an option to subscribe to an online-only model.
We have been pleased with the number of people who, having free access because of print subscriptions, have taken the effort to register for online access. We believe this will be a solid barometer in the future of an engaged reader who took the time to register - and this may have value with potential advertisers. We have also been pleased with the high number of subscribers for our online only product. Based on feedback from another, similar-sized newspaper that has a pay wall, I have always felt that I can declare victory if we get 4,000 online-only subscribers. That would be close to $500,000 in incremental income being generated out of the newsroom. While we have a fraction of those subscribers currently, I have been quite pleased with the pace of this subscription base.
Q. Has it had any effect on your overall Web traffic on the free portion of the site?
Page views have dropped dramatically since the implementation of a pay wall. But we also saw a dramatic drop when our newspaper was sold, and our website moved from Cox Newspapers (which had owned us) as a web host to an independent web host. (Note: Sanchez told me the site averaged 1000,000 unique visitors last year but Quantcast estimates the number of visits ranged between 60,000 and 80,000 in September, October and November.)
While we are not yet prepared to draw a correlation yet, we have also noticed that print circulation has increased by more than 3 percent (to about 37,000 daily) since a pay wall went up. And another positive trend has been the number of print subscribers who are now actively paying for their subscriptions online after the pay wall went up. We are hoping the convenience of this type of financial transaction will lower our print churn rate, but we’re not prepared to declare any trend on that front.
Q. Have you had any significant community response about the change?
Surprisingly, we have had just as much positive response as negative. In some respects, it has been fun responding to critics of our pay wall and pointing out the logic of their argument that content should remain free. I frequently ask what they do for a living because I would love to have their services for free. Also, some of the criticism has emanated from misunderstanding. When I explain that obits and multimedia are free - and that all content if free with a print subscription - the critics respond back expressing gratitude.
Those who have commended our efforts have uniformly said they like the fact that others are being forced to pay for something that they, as loyal print subscribers, have been
having to pay for years.
Q. What led your news organization to set this up?
While the executive leadership began researching a pay wall option as long as three years ago, the move on that path came when new owners bought our newspapers. These owners had no newspaper background - they came from the insurance industry - and they could not fathom, after having done due diligence, why we were giving away content that cost so much to produce and post on a website. Our strategy upon purchase became very aggressive. We had 90 days to get onto an independent hosting site and we gave ourselves another quarter to set up a pay wall.
Our strategy also was to market this not as a pay wall, but as a premium for print subscribers. We called the entire project OnlinePlus, and sold it as an added premium for print subscribers. We also coordinated the roll out of a very robust e-edition with the pay wall as an added inducement that loyal print subscribers were getting more value for their subscription.
Q. What, if any, adjustments have you had to make along the way?
Without a doubt, our biggest adjustment was in delaying implementation to accommodate the technical complexities of a pay wall. In addition to gaining a new host, which required a lot of scripting language for our front end system to communicate with our new content management system, we had to write additional scripting to suddenly have both systems communicate with our circulation system. Add in the security requirements for online transactions, and you have countless points where problems could - and did - arise.
Q. Is it really possible to build an impenetrable play wall on the Web?
Piracy is an ongoing problem that we discovered plagues most sites with a pay wall. As one internet expert told me, there’s nothing to prevent you from putting your user id and password to your bank account online for others to access; so if a reader does it for a newspaper website, there is little to do to prevent that other than shut down the account when it comes to our attention—which we have done.
Q. What advice do you have for other news organizations seeking to gain revenue in exchange for providing access to news online?
I would offer the same advice as was offered to me when I reached out to a newspaper that already had a pay wall: just do it. The technical and marketing challenges would be many, but the push back from the public would not be as great as we all fear. Traffic would drop, but would you rather have one million page views that are free or 100,000 page views that are bringing in revenue? Finally, do not underestimate the technical challenges.
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Great insight into the ups and downs, and the general thought process of trying to put the “free content” genie back into the bottle. Hope the process continues to work well for the paper.
By BPerkins, 01/20/11 at 11:59 am
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