Paywall Tech Roll-Up Continues as Piano Courts TinyPass

The paywall tech industry has seen plenty of consolidation but another big merger may be in the offing. Last fall, Piano Media’s acquisition of industry leader Press+ created the largest company in the trade (Newsonomics: The Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech ...

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The Newsonomics of the Shopping of Press+ and The Coming of Paywalls 2.0

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   In April 2009, when Journalism Online began operations, its business — providing the backend for websites offering different kinds of paywalls — was largely derided. Two years later, when the company — having largely assumed the ...

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The Newsonomics of ARPU, Counting Revenue per Visitor

If close to right, the value of a unique visitor is 3.5x greater for the Times than for HuffPo, in advertising. It’s 4x greater for the Guardian than Mail Online.

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Beyond Journalism, Beyond Press, Journalism Online Moves into the B2B World

They ran into these realities of the newspaper business: 1. You can have the best technology in the world, and it'll be a slow sell to publishers. 2. The news industry is small, and getting smaller. 3. The revenue streams are smaller, and JO's share of them is smaller. 4. Nothing -- meaning ...

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Nine Questions as the NYT’s Pay Fence Gets Ready to Go Global

Is part of the plan a backdoor Sunday paper/digital access new bundle? Three of the people I talked with on the day of the announcement had begun to run the subscribe-to-Sunday, get-free-digital access numbers in their head. At a $4-a-week introductory rate, that’s $208 a year. Which gets you ...

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NYT’s Good Timing on Pay Launch, Amid News Chaos

Here is the growing epiphany about these core readers: Not only do they pay you, they use lots more than the fly-by people, the non-core sent by Google, Facebook, Twitter and all manner of other referrals. More than 50% of the Financial Times traffic comes from about 10% of its unique visitors, ...

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Nine Questions on the Dallas Morning News Pay Plan

How big will the Morning News payoff be? Let's look at the emerging one percent rule here. If the Morning News were to get -- after some period of time -- one percent of its 4-5 million monthly uniques to sign up for a digital-only subscription, and stick, that would be worth $9 million a year. ...

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The Newsonomics of Apple’s/Google’s/Press+’s Pay-for-All

What’s a solution to the mess? Well, there are any number of solutions. Here’s mine: Apple goes ahead and sells digital subscriptions in its store. On revenue shares, it takes 30 percent the first year, 20 percent the second year, 10 percent the third year, and 5 percent each subsequent year ...

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Apple’s “New” Policy: Looking Beyond Digital Circ Dollars to Ads & Data

Digital circulation money, though it may the highest profile part of this story, isn't the most curious issue involved here. There are at least three big issues for media companies -- and you can put Netflix, Hulu and Rhapsody in the mix here -- surfacing here: Selling a customer across all ...

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The Newsonomics of Overnight Digital Customers

That’s right. You’re no longer a “user”, a hateful term if ever one were invented, or a “visitor,” or a brother from another digital planet. Overnight, you’re a customer again. In this psychology, a news company has put a value on what it produces. You, the customer, now are being shown that ...

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