Newsday Pay Wall Not Popular

This report is a bit dated but nonetheless interesting. In October 2009, the Long Island daily Newsday was bought by James Dolan for $650 million. At the same time, Newsday put its website, newsday.com, behind a pay wall.

The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall, so in media circles it has been followed with interest. Could its fate be a sign of what others, including The New York Times, might expect?

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen.

Heh, that's an astonishingly poor response and not nearly enough to even hint that it was a good idea. Furthermore, I recall the New York Times tried the pay wall approach for some of its prominent columnists with presumably similar results since the paid Times Select subscription idea was abandoned after about a year.

This is not to say that pay walls won't work because they surely do. All that's required is to offer a product that attracts paying customers or, in the case of a newspaper, a paying audience. So far, neither Newsday nor the Times apparently offer an online product that people are willing to pay for.