Going paywall...

My paper is going to a paywall starting Monday. Long overdue in my opinion, but what should I expect?

 

A lot of bitchin' from people who expect to get things (especially the news) for free ...

 

No one to read anything anymore.

 

Buy some beer for whoever answers the phone, handles social media, deals with public, etc.

 

Yeah...this is why papers should have been on board with this from Day 1...not decades after the fact.
Just saw a post the other day on Twitter about Netflix
"I like your content, I access it all the time, but how dare you expect me to pay $11 a month for the service"
Same with newspapers, why people just expect us to be there is beyond me.
If you value local news be willing to support it ... and yes, that means financially. Our subscription rate is far from breaking the bank.

 

I'm heading out of vacation and due back the day after the paywall goes up, sounds like I should expect full inboxes

 

What bothers me the most about all the whining is that the cost of a subscription is dirt cheap. If it’s important to people, they should pay the measly $10-20/month. If it isn’t, they should just STHU.

 

That's not really all that cheap.

 

We went paywall and then switched back about a year later.

 

We're twice a week ($45 for print/digital or $35 for digital-only) per year. So yeah, you are getting digital access for the cost of a cheap Starbucks each month.

 

Is this going to be a full paywall or metered?

 

I hope it's a timed or full paywall.

Metered paywalls are the least effective and most cumbersome to deal with. For one, they're easy to get around via adblockers, private browsing, and other methods. Two, they often simply don't work.

A timed paywall is nice because everyone can read an article when it first goes up, but if it's been up for more than a day, or a week, or whatever the timer is, it goes behind a paywall that can't be worked around.

The most effective is a full paywall, like The Athletic, but it's hard to commit to that switch and it's hard to grab a new audience without making some content free as a teaser.