Worth Considering
The Not-So-Free Press
I’ve been in the business of selling newsletters by subscription since my Peace Corps days. The subscription business was always bigger than the general advertising business, but nobody knew it. When the internet became the thing around 2000, we changed from 90% paper to 90% digital in just a few years, but we continued with the subscription model because we realized it was perfect for digital marketing. And digital marketing was growing like crazy.
Since then, we’ve gradually seen our publishing competitors (newspapers and magazines) gradually shift from relying on advertising to subscription models.
The Wall Street Journal was one of the first major news sites to put up a “paywall” (as it’s called). Reuters, one of the world’s largest news publishers, is the latest.
According to an article from The Daily Upside that BK forwarded to me, they are relaunching their website to focus on business and financial news… and asking their readers to pay for it. (“It seems,” says BK, “like the media world is still trying to figure out what you guys figured out years ago.”)
After a “preview period” of 5 free articles a month, digital subscribers will pay $34.99. That’s what Bloomberg, Reuters’ main rival, has been charging – and Bloomberg expects to reach about 400,000 consumer subscriptions this year, up from 250,000 last year. The WSJ charges $38.99, and the NYT charges $18.42.
The article points out that “the ‘professional’ audience (aka, those with a corporate expense account) is a lucrative audience to target. And many publishers are beginning to see the value of stable subscription revenue…. In 2020, subscription news revenue grew 16% even as advertising revenues slumped heavily amid the pandemic. Overall, the subscription news economy has grown by nearly 500% in the past decade.”