It’s been 20 years since The Buffalo News began publishing
content online. Like so many other publishers during the first decade of the
new millennium, The News found itself facing sinking profits as freely
available content and online advertising opportunities cannibalized the print
product.
Responding
to a 40 percent decline in operating profits, the publisher launched its first
paywall in 2012 in an attempt to recuperate some of those losses. In that
initial model, non-subscribers could access 10 stories free of charge, followed
by a weekly rate of $2.77 for additional content and $1.99 per week for Sundays
only.
But The
News soon found that the technology was easy to bypass and logging in was more
cumbersome for paid subscribers than simply working around the paywall to
access content. Furthermore, the technology was limited when it came to
establishing targeting parameters for content, and its testing and reporting
capabilities were extremely limited.
“We looked
at solutions all over the place and every one we saw had flaws,” Buffalo News
Editor Mike Connelly told News & Tech. “Either they were too easy to get
around, or they had real data and reporting limitations.”
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