Articles:

Why Pay Walls Kill Publishers!

To understand why pay walls do not work for online publishers, it is important to understand what exactly a pay wall is, and how it works. A pay wall is a window on a website that blocks further access to a web page without payment. A number of publishers incorporate pay walls into their sites, making only a certain amount of content freely available.

Today information is available freely on the internet, and publishers are realising that pay per view or pay walled content is beginning to run at a loss as fewer people are willing to pay for their information. Information is available everywhere, but if there is something that makes certain new providers better than others, it is the apparent value added to their content by well known columnists, and of course the quality of journalism.

But with the advent of real time independent blogs and suchlike, it is now possible to access columnists and writers on their own turf. How then, can publishers of online content continue to run a profit making business? Do they need a new model?

The fact is that the number of people willing to subscribe to content, that is, pay for it, is going to go down and not up. Keeping this in mind, new systems of selling paid content are going to have to be developed.