In a year the New York Times has succeeded in gathering nearly half a million digital subscribers. Next month it will tighten things up for non-subscribers, only allowing 10 free articles per month (where 20 per month are presently allowed). It is clear that the paywall experiment for the Times is working quite well.Ryan Chittum writes about his own expectations for the paywall and mistaken assumptions in the Columbia Journalism blog today.
You can see the steady growth over the past year in the chart below:
This week Lee Enterprises, publisher of the St. Louis Post Dispatch and other smaller midwest papers, said that they also plan on implementing a paywall for most if not all of their subscribers before the end of the year. (The comments on the Lee story are somewhat amusing, with words like dinosaur and buggy whip being bandied about.) And Gannett, another big publisher (most notably of USA Today) also announced last month they will begin their own paywalls too. Readers will get five to 15 stories free depending on the publication.
We have written frequently on the progress of (and how easy it is to get around) the Times paywall over the past year, including a review of the Times’ election iPhone app which can be found here.
