

Slovak media goes behind paywall - Aqwis
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9476374.stm

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cemi
I live in Slovakia and I find this article misleading.

Behind paywall are only some articles (e.g. not the daily news), comments and
some smaller specialized site sections.

Visitor can still read online daily news for free there.

~~~
forcer
Also, what is weird that BBC article quotes the main guy behind the project as
a great success, but when you look at the actual newspaper websites, you could
struggle to find any information about paywall. e.g. on sme.sk

e.g. "After two days we have reached our goals for the whole month," he said.

What goal was it? I am really struggling to hit the paywall. I had to go to
their project website -
<http://www.pianomedia.sk/payment/index.php?xSwitchLang=en> to get any
information about the paywal.

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vetinari
Try some article with grey key or teraz.sme.sk

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simonw
Key part of that article:

"Slovakia has a population of only 5.7m, it is also the only country in which
the Slovak language is universally spoken. This language isolation makes it
easier for the market to be harnessed in this way"

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muuh-gnu
That is the point of small languages, to be able to easily cut off the people
speaking those languages from the rest of the world by deyning them
information. Instead of investing money for access to these newspapers, the
slovaks should invest time and better learn a bigger, globally used language,
to reroute the paywall and to get more independent of local news suppliers.

~~~
thingie
Almost any Slovak can easily understand Czech and read pretty much anything
written in the neighbouring Czech republic (where paid internet media are
quite unlikely in the near future), but I guess that they are interested in
what is going on in their country, general worldwide and Czech news won't do.

~~~
rwmj
Good opportunity for a Czech website to set up a Slovak news subsite? It need
not cost too much just to filter Slovak news to one site.

~~~
vetinari
Could be an opportunity for Czechs.

However, it is not necessary. Not all news sites are putting up the paywall
and even those that are, they are not doing it for wire news (SME and Pravda
are doing it for opinion pages, occasional "premium articles" and discussion
boards).

SME tried it in the past and it was a failure, that did them more damage than
improvements; this time they tried to cooperate among publishers and do it at
the same time, but they still do not have critical mass. Most people that
didn't drink the cool-aid expect it to fail again.

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derrida
I can't wait until all of the old media go behind a paywall: imagine what
grand ambitious projects will fill the void!

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Aqwis
This is essentially the NYT paywall but on a grander scale. While whatever
happens in Slovakia is not likely to have a direct effect on the rest of the
world, it'll be an interesting test of the paywall model for online news.

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dr_win
30% for doing a middleman sounds to me quite a lot.

