Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Then they're in trouble. It's been shown over and over on the web that you only get a very small minority of your users to subscribe when you're using a paywall, and citizen journalism can provide the vast majority of the news.
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On paywalls, I wonder if it isn't a matter of presentation? Right now, you actually do seem to run into a wall if you go to, say, the Wall Street Journal site. You are there, but there's this screen in your way. Easy enough to run around it, of course, but the point it, the metaphor of a "wall" does seem appropriate.
But what is going to happen as we move into the Universe of Apps? The presentation changes - now what you do is make a selection of an App, which you purchase or rent for a period of time.
I read the WSJ at work each day, sharing a copy with several other people. It's inconvenient. For a while, I had my own subscription, but let it lapse in a cost cutting move when my wife retired. They keep sending me offers, reducing the price. It's down to about $100 a year now. If the WSJ puts together a decent iPad app for that price, I think I'll give in.
I've often wondered why Apple doesn't sell Apps to run on its computers. I could imagine News Apps selling pretty well.
People think that the web is free, and expect anything on it to be free. But they don't have the same expectations for Apps, so maybe that's a way out for newspapers. You buy the NYT app, and it is on your iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. It syncs across devices. It contains some kind of map or index that allows you to keep track of where you are in the app as you move from one article to another. It links to previous articles. It pushes News Flashes and Weather Updates. It allows you to archive articles, or email them to friends, or tweet them.
And yeah, you can do all that on the web, but the difference is that you have to hunt things down on the web, whereas a properly designed App could be tailormade to do it for you.