There was a while where the issue of online news property paywalls, consumed much of our blog posts and it was a trend triggered by Rupert Murdoch himself, when he rolled out his plan, publicly, to take all of his news titles to a pay for access format – a promise which has yet to be fulfilled. Then the news of paywalls died down somewhat, until raised by the New York Times in the spring. Regardless, many felt that given pained performance (Web traffic and revenues), the topic had been muted for most. So, it was to our surprise to see that The Onion was embarking on their own form of a paywall that will see international users of the site, pay to access more than five articles per month.
The Onion is a satirical online news site, which was originally founded in 1988 in print format and then taken to the Web in 1996. It has operated in an open environment for all this time, so their wanting to move to a pay for content format is surprising. Further, their reasoning’s for the move seems to follow a ‘the other kids are doing it so…’.
Our position on paywalls is now what it always was, publishers need to amass an audience of readers and work to monetize the audience through their adver tising platforms. It’s unfair to the reader to want to monetize their patronage and yet still charge them for it.
The road of a paywall is not an easy one, just ask Murdoch and even the New York Times, who has taken to launch a Living Social Deal for their titles to try to increase subscription revenues. It will be interesting to see how the Onion will adapt.
