siliconANGLE » Newsday.com Destined for Failure with Pay Wall

Newsday.com Destined for Failure with Pay Wall

Jeff Nolan | October 22nd
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image  Cablevision must have gotten punch drunk with all of the talk coming out of newspapers about going to a subscription model for their online services, because they are going big, really big, with a $260 a year pricing plan for Newsday.com

Those who are not customers of Optimum Online or the newspaper – both owned by Bethpage-based Cablevision Systems Corp. – will have to pay a $5 weekly fee. However, nonpaying customers will have access to some of newsday.com’s information, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings. There also will be some limited access to Newsday stories.

[From Newsday.com moves to subscriber model]

In reality this is a lot of talk about something that will actually have very little impact on revenue because if you are a Newsday subscribers or a Cablevision cable customer you will have access to the Newsday.com site for no extra charge. Given that Newsday is concentrated on Long Island imageand Cablevision has a virtual lock on that region, what the online pricing plan is doing is not increasing revenue but defending revenue that is under assault by adding the online service as something extra subscribers get.

In the final analysis, this is exactly why it will fail. By creating a pricing plan that defends rather than attacks a market the company is conceding defeat in print and this strategy will have the effect of slowing audience growth online in the one segment that the paper requires, young people. I am willing to give Newsday and Cablevision some credit for being creative with a multichannel strategy that covers TV, print and online, but this pricing plan is a throwback to a subscription model that simply doesn’t work anymore.

In the same vein:

About Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
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  1. The SiliconANGLE: Newsday.com pay wall ‘destined for failure’ | Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog says:
    October 23, 2009 at 4:59 am

    [...] Full post at this link… [...]

  2. links for 2009-10-24 says:
    October 24, 2009 at 8:05 am

    [...] Newsday.com Destined for Failure with Pay Wall « The SiliconANGLE Kevin: Jeff Nolan writes: "By creating a pricing plan that defends rather than attacks a market the company is conceding defeat in print and this strategy will have the effect of slowing audience growth online in the one segment that the paper requires, young people. I am willing to give Newsday and Cablevision some credit for being creative with a multichannel strategy that covers TV, print and online, but this pricing plan is a throwback to a subscription model that simply doesn’t work anymore." (tags: paidcontent newspapers online businessmodels) [...]