

No newspaper is having an easy time, but one faces unique challenges - 001sky
http://www.economist.com/node/21563334?fsrc=scn/ln_ec/unguarded

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TazeTSchnitzel
Honestly, I have money. I just wish I had a convenient way to give it. If
micropayments were easy, I'd make them. The Onion has been pestering me
recently about a subscription. There's no way I'd subscribe... but I can
guarantee I would pay 10p or 10¢ if they let me. Same goes for online Guardian
articles.

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cpeterso
There are few online news sites I would commit to subscribe to (except LWN,
Linux "Weekly" News), but I would gladly micro-pay or tip for many individual
articles if it was convenient and secure. Preferably some trustworthy third
party service, not a site-specific feature.

I don't want advertisements to be the answer. Ad blockers are easy to install.
When I disable my ad blocker and Ghostery, I'm reminded of just how blighted
mainstream news sites have become by ads, social media buttons, and floating
sidebars.

On the other hand, pay walls and subscription-only content reduces public
access to news and the sites' Google juice.

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cstejerean
The metered paywall seems like a decent approach though. You can view X
articles for free in a month. So if you just occasionally land on an article,
you don't need to pay. But if it becomes something you look at regularly you
need to buy a subscription.

~~~
snogglethorpe
The problem is that paywall pricing is often wonky.

The NYT, for instance lets you read 20 articles per month for free. But wanna
read 21? $15/month ($180/year).

[In reality, of course, it's trivial to get past the NYT's paywall, but that's
not really relevant.]

If you read, say, 50 articles per month, that's about $0.50 per article ($15
for the 30 articles over your 20 free ones), which for most articles, even in
a quality paper, is _way too much_.

I guess the papers basically reason that it's like a paper subscription but a
bit less... but that doesn't really reflect the way people read papers
electronically. When you buy a physical paper, you often read a lot of it, and
it serves as a major part of your news. You feel like you got a pretty good
value from your investment (and the physical medium aids that feeling, even if
it's a waste). But people get news on the internet from tons of different
sources, and the value of any one paper is a lot less, even if you like it a
lot.

I value papers like the NYT because they actually do a lot of important things
(e.g. sending reporters into war zones, and doing deep investigative
journalism), but the gut feeling of "value" for their digital subscriptions
simply isn't there in the same way it was for the physical paper.

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comatose_kid
I wonder if it would make sense to stop publishing a physical paper?

Subsidize an ipad3 for long term subscribers?

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philip1209
Is the Economist still cashflow-positive?

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rabidsnail
Yes, but they do a lot of stuff besides writing articles (they host
conferences, have a consulting arm, etc).

The horse's mouth:
[http://www.economistgroup.com/pdfs/annual_report_2012_final_...](http://www.economistgroup.com/pdfs/annual_report_2012_final_for_web.pdf)

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panacea
I wound pay for a Guardian subscription.

