Saturday, March 23, 2019

Buffalo News offering digital paywall tech to other publishers


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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