
After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site - icey
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/after-three-months-only-35-subscriptions-newsdays-web-site
======
andre
Take into account that traffic fell from 2.2 Million to 1.5 Million unique
users in the 3 months that that paywall has been up.

So out of the 700,000 uniques that stopped reading, they only converted 35 to
paying.

------
jacquesm
It looks like newsday has other issues (pun not intended) besides a very lousy
conversion rate.

If they make it to next year without going bust or being sold again it would
highly surprise me.

Their only saving grace is that they actually provided the figure.

I can't make the numbers work though, 35 subscribers for $20 / month since
october works out to 140*$20 maximum, which is a lot less than the $9000
quoted in the article.

~~~
pohl
The article did phrase it as an approximation ("With those 35 people, they've
grossed about $9,000.").

If 35 people sign up to pay $260 per year, that's $9100.

~~~
jacquesm
If they signed up per year, yes.

But their subscription terms are '$5 per week'.

So, unless I'm completely uninformed about consumer law, that means they have
to do recurring billing on a weekly schedule charging $5 each time the
subscription renews, and customers can cancel at any one point in time.

See here:

[http://www.newsday.com/services/7.387?registration=true&...](http://www.newsday.com/services/7.387?registration=true&online=true)

Any two bit webmaster running a site with a subscription model would be able
to tell you some of the downsides of that registration page and why you really
don't want to do this (the $5 / week charge) but that's their problem.

So, what they've grossed is the number of subscribers times the number of
weeks, once they've figured out their 'life cycle' they can project to future
earnings.

People do not as a rule fork over a years subscription in advance, another
truth of online recurring billing. That's a great way to have to refund _all_
of the money if the customer is not 100% satisfied during the run of the
subscription.

So, the 'middle ground' is monthly billing, with in case of a dispute a
maximum 3 month refund.

I also love their 'opt-out' for spam checkbox (check to opt-out, default
'unchecked'), and the fact that they (optionally) ask you to fill out your
gender and birth date.

> " Please check this box if you prefer not to be emailed "

The marketing joys of double negatives.

~~~
idlewords
Subscriptions in newspaperland are never weekly. They get marketed as $x/week
in order to reduce sticker shock, but you pay yearly or twice a year.

~~~
jacquesm
I can see a few very pissed off users in their future then, and it makes me
wonder what would happen if they would simply make it a monthly subscription.

Do you have any proof of this ? The website says very clearly $5 / week.

~~~
icey
Whenever I've gotten a newspaper subscription they've said it would cost $x a
week, and then when it was time to settle up they'd either charge for 6 or 12
months in advance.

~~~
jacquesm
I can't equate 'subscribing to a newspaper' with 'subscribing to a website
owned by a newspaper'.

------
forgotAgain
As a resident locally "served" by Newsday I can only ask: what were those 35
people thinking!

Comparing Newsday to the NY Times does a disservice to the Times. Since being
taken over by Cablevision, Newsday can best be described as the New York
Knicks of media. It has become a throwaway add-on for Cablevision in its
competition with Verizon Fios.

~~~
joshwa
In Newsday's geographic target area (Long Island, NY), if a news consumer is
the type of reader who mainly reads news online, they'll go with the Times, or
even the NY Post or Daily News online, rather than Newsday. Newsday's print
readers (even before the Cablevision takeover) are the readers most likely to
be still consuming print -- they skew older, less affluent, and less educated.

Newsday's only competitive advantage content-wise, relative to the other NY
papers, are hyper-local Long Island politics, culture listings, and
classifieds. There just isn't any overlap between people interested in these
things and people who consume most of their news online (AND are willing to
pay for it).

------
noodle
the headline is a bit misleading. that is 35 paid online subscriptions from
people who don't already have a print subscription (who get online access for
free), and/or who don't already have a cablevision account (who get a free
account).

i'd be interested in knowing the number of people who are new subs for the
print version in that same timeframe, and/or new subs from the cable deal.

~~~
seldo
Even with all the free/bundled subscriptions, they admit that traffic is way
down:

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/newsday.com/>

The paywall actually only went up at the end of 10/2009, but even so it's
clear that audience loss accelerated, something like a 25% loss in November.

------
adamt
"The web site redesign and relaunch cost the Dolans $4 million"

I didn't realise people still spent $4M on what is basically a CMS. They could
have bought a news focus and proven CMS like Ellington for less than a
fraction of a percent of that. Leaving plenty of change to play for design.

------
chris123
Maybe there's never a "good" time to put up a pay wall, but it seems pretty
dumb or naive to try to do it now, while so many people are still eliminating
recurring expenses and generally trying to save money. If money is tight,
switching to a free alternative when one of the sites you hit online puts up a
pay wall seems like a no-brainer.

Reminds me of "the penny gap" (see
<http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html>). This is
especially true with discretionary items and items that have many competitors
and substitutes, especially free ones. That's the situation with newspapers.
Sure, some might say each newspaper and writer is unique, which is true,
but...

...maybe people aren't looking for _"the best"_ newspaper or writer or web
app, maybe they're looking for _"the best free"_ newspaper, writer, or web
app. NOTE: "Free" in this case means "ad supported," or at least "no
subscription required."

------
nfnaaron
"35 people."

I wonder how big the Newsday executive suite is?

------
jswinghammer
I think they probably captured everyone that makes reading Newday's website a
regular part of their day. I can't imagine ever doing that personally but I
guess it's possible. I hope that they just refund those people their money and
move on and try something else.

~~~
jacquesm
> and move on and try something else.

Like what ?

This is their hail-Mary pass, if the subscription model does not work what are
they supposed to do next?

If this is an example of what will happen when paywalls rise on 'old media'
sites then they're dead in the water.

~~~
Zev
_This is their hail-Mary pass, if the subscription model does not work what
are they supposed to do next?_

Put someone competent in charge of the paper and removing quality articles and
placing ads in the paper instead. Also, go back to a format that resembles a
newspaper that has news in it, rather then tabloid newspapers. I used to read
Newsday on a daily basis.

It took approximately a month under the Dolans (current owners) for my
subscription to be canceled due to the reasons above. If the problems were
fixed, I'd gladly go back to reading Newsday instead of switching between the
Times and the Daily News.

Because currently, this isn't a story of a _news_ paper dying. Its a story of
the _tabloids_ dying. And good riddance; perez hilton and the ilk don't need
syndication.

~~~
Zev
Correction: _and removing quality_ should have been "and _stop_ removing
quality"

------
RyanMcGreal
Summary: if you horribly mismanage a newspaper, you will lose readers.

------
kcway95
Print pub management is never going to be able to figure out this web thing.

Their egos are too big and they are totally incapable of dragging themselves
away from the "Ad Block" business model.

They are never going to be able to see readers as anything but numbers that
they deliver to advertisers. I think the whole business will be pretty much
gone by 2020 and, in my opinion, all I can say is "Good Riddance".

------
parka
There are so many Internet business models but why is it that the subscription
model is the only one they can think of.

Newspaper industry clearly needs a new business model. But the bigger problem
is really the management who are incapable of coming up with one, or incapable
of executing.

This is really a people problem.

------
tcarnell
[http://trends.google.com/websites?q=newsday.com&geo=all&...](http://trends.google.com/websites?q=newsday.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

------
Yaa101
35 pairs of eyeballs makes me think that they will not make fantastic
advertisement deals, I think they are doomed when keeping the paywalls up

------
eli
5$ a week seems very expensive. Surely they weren't making that much per print
subscriber

