Member Avatar for MktgRob

Here on Long Island, the local newspaper Newsday recently began a policy that if you are not a subscriber to Newsday and are not an Optimum Cable customer of their parent company, Cablevision, you will have to pay $5 per week to access the newspaper's website.
I think this is a case of a dying newspaper (Newsday has been losing readership and subscribers at a steady rate over the last few year) owned by a company that is notorious for jacking up the rates on their cable services because they are the only cable provider on LI, using e-commerce to try to drive business to the brick & mortar side of the business. As there are many things wrong with Newsday and the parent company, I cannot see this being a successful strategy.

But if they were a better run company with better content and a better reputation, does anyone think a policy like this would work?

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and raise the two practical questions every publisher and marketer should ask: will readers pay, and under what conditions will charging for access actually grow sustainable revenue? The short answer: it can work, but only when a digital product is clearly differentiated, habit-forming, and backed by measurement and testing — not used as a blunt instrument to push print sales.

A pragmatic rollout for a local publisher looks like this: audit which stories and formats drive repeat visits, define a simple paid product (exclusive reporting, timely alerts, members-only newsletters or events), pick a model to test (metered, freemium, or membership), run controlled A/B tests for pricing and messaging, and measure conversion, churn, lifetime value and engagement by cohort. Make checkout frictionless, offer short trials, and invest in retention (email, personalization, member benefits). Avoid sudden sitewide paywalls that alienate casual readers; instead use staged experiments and clear value communication.

Metrics to watch: conversion rate, retention/churn, average revenue per user (ARPU), and changes in overall traffic and social distribution. Be cautious about depending on a single revenue stream and about undermining trust — quality and local relevance are the real leverage points for subscriptions.

If the goal is access to local news rather than supporting a particular publisher, low-friction options include trial subscriptions, public library digital access, targeted newsletters, or supporting nonprofit/community outlets that publish local reporting.

For industry context and up-to-date data on subscription trends and audience behavior, see the Pew Research Center newspapers fact sheet and the Reuters Institute Digital News Report: Pew Research Center newspapers fact sheet and Reuters Institute Digital News Report.

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Member Avatar for jay 11

Some people are hell bent on getting your local news/gossip, so I can see a small percentage of people willing to pay for the online access. But with so many other news outlets online, I cannot see this model working long term. It's a shame though... there's really no other paper that caters to Long Island, NY. I wonder if Topix or any other third party still distributes their content?

Member Avatar for MktgRob

There are a number of regional newspapers on LI as well as News 12 on Cable. They all do a decent job of covering the small news and issues and with the Daily News, NY Post and even the Times in the City willing to cover the big stuff, I think Newsday has lost their opportunity and their window. It does not help that they have a reputation for being biased to certain viewpoints.

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