Notes from a news-site paywall attempt

By at 3:33 am Monday, Nov 30


New Zealand's National Business Review stuck a paywall in front of its website back in mid-July, betting that enough readers would stick around and pay for "quality" that it would make up for the stupendous drop in readership. Looks like they bet wrong. Their traffic plummeted, and traffic to their free competitors skyrocketed. On every metric, NBR is failing: pageviews, session duration, unique readers, and total time on site. NBR has a high paywall price, so maybe they've got enough money from corporate subscribers to make up for the advertising losses -- but how long will they keep them for, with all the links, visits, and attention going to their competitors?

NBR's performance since the subscription wall was built (via O'Reilly Radar)

Previously:

Read more 

Cory Doctorow

Upcoming appearances

* Feb 9, 2012, DeKalb, IL: Day of Doctorow, NIU
* Feb 10-12, 2012, Chicago, IL: Capricon 32
* Feb 13, 2012, Arlington, TX: UT Arlington College of Engineering Distinguished Speaker Series
* Feb 16, 2012, Victoria, BC: 13th Annual Privacy and Security Conference

Recent books:
* Context (essays)
* With a Little Help (short stories)
* For the Win (YA novel)
* Makers (adult novel)

Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.