paywalls

Google News Initiative is partnering with Lee Enterprises, a provider of news, information, and advertising in 50 markets, and its digital technology subsidiary, TownNews, to expedite the development of a machine […]

Non-subscribers visiting WSJ.com now get a score, based on dozens of signals, that indicates how likely they’ll be to subscribe. The paywall tightens or loosens accordingly: “The content you see is the output of the paywall, rather than an input.”

This week, Denver Post staffers rallied around their paper’s new $11.99-per-month paywall, optimistic that the move might bring more resources to a beleaguered Post newsroom. But the paywall goes up at a rocky time for Colorado’s largest newspaper, in which layoffs, an impending move, and the sudden resignation of its publisher have left some at the paper feeling destabilized.

The great paywall tightening of 2017 continues. The New York Times said Friday that it will cut the number of free articles available to “most” non-subscribers each month from 10 to five. The change is the most significant one the Times has made to its pay model since 2012, when it cut the number of monthly free articles from 20 to 10.

The E.W. Scripps-owned WCPO.com is moving in on Cincinnati.com’s turf, though both outlets ultimately see the competition as driving richer, deeper journalism for the city and the greater Cincinnati region.

Scripps-owned WCPO Cincinnati was the first television station to launch a paywall around premium content. Fifteen months later, Scripps is holding the station’s subscriber numbers close to the vest, but it says it’s meeting internal revenue targets thanks to aggressive sales, and it’s planning to roll out its “Insider Rewards” program to other stations.

Sites initially adopted paywalls and paid content strategies to establish value for their products and open up a much-needed new digital revenue stream. Since then, many have tweaked their individual models to better fit their markets, and some are also coming to realize there may be another layer of value and revenue to be mined from paywalls: the consumer data they collect from them. The first in a two-part special report.

WCPO.com takes a backseat in traffic to Cincinnati.com, the website for the Gannett-owned daily Cincinnati Enquirer. Before WCPO’s paywall, from July to December 2013, Cincinnati.com led the market with 1,107,000 […]

The prospect of a lone gunman wreaking havoc at Cincinnati’s 2015 All-Star Game. The ravaged lives of a heroin epidemic blooming across Ohio and Northern Kentucky. The last watch of […]

The Scripps Cincinnati station is betting big that people will pay for in-depth local content with value-added member benefits.

Under the leadership of CEO Rich Boehne and Digital SVP Adam Symson, the E.W. Scripps Co. is engaged in an earnest effort at multifront innovation to do a rare thing in local media — proactively getting in front of its destiny. Here are some lessons that other media companies can learn from.

The WCPO Cincinnati experiment, whose boldness derives from an unprecedented ask of its users, ultimately has The E. W. Scripps Co. re-examining its entire approach to TV news content and cross digital/broadcast news production. Scripps is reframing its marketing message to consumers, and, in the process, re-examining how to give value to consumers beyond a content play, using the consumer data it’s now more closely collecting and parsing to heighten user affinity and personalization. The first in a series looking at digital innovation across Scripps.

The Scripps Cincinnati ABC affiliate’s website is giving users a taste of what they will be missing if they don’t subscribe — a six-month investigative report on the murder of a local cop Scripps plans to put such reports and other premium content on the site behind a paywall early this year.

E.W. Scripps on Thursday shocked the broadcast TV world by announcing that it was raising a paywall for the site of its Cincinnati ABC affiliate WCPO. Michael Depp: “With this move, there is no doubt that Scripps takes its digital platform gravely seriously. What we’ll now see is if the wall it’s building in Cincinnati is more than just between paying subscribers and less-committed users.”

E.W. Scripps-owned WCPO Cincinnati on Thursday announced that it will launch a digital subscription model around its premium content in January. The TV paywall is unprecedented and faces an uphill battle to win over consumers who align broadcast television content with being free. Still, company executives are confident the paywall will be successful. “We’ve tried to build a plan against understanding that there are people who will only love us on television and only love us on a smartphone,” says Rich Boehne, E.W. Scripps’ CEO.

Publishers including Maxim, Radar Online, Guitar World and USA Today Sports Media are experimenting with a paywall that instead of charging readers requires them to watch an advertiser’s video. The tactic, which uses a system called Content Unlock from Genesis Media, is meant to help address the disconnect between advertisers’ interest in buying Web video and consumers’ desire to watch enough of it.

The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both announced via Twitter that they would be lowering their paywalls during Hurricane Sandy. The Times confirmed the move Sunday afternoon to Poynter’s Julie Moos.

Howard Owens, publisher of local Internet pureplay The Batavian: “As a matter of business reality, when an incumbent business moves deeper into sustaining innovation it opens up opportunities for disruptors. In every market where a newspaper puts up a paywall, an opportunity is created for an entrepreneur to start a local online news business.”

As more newspapers close the door on free access to their websites, some publishers are still waiting for paying customers to pour in. The numbers of readers signing up so far suggest that at many papers, “paywalls” aren’t about to reverse publishers’ deteriorating finances. Yet the results aren’t discouraging industry executives, who say their efforts are succeeding in shoring up the core print business after years of declines.

A little over a week after Fox instituted its eight-day delay for non-authenticated viewers of its shows online, BitTorrent has seen a dramatic rise in the number of viewers downloading the broadcaster’s shows.