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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Newsonomics: The Financial Times Triples Its Profits and Swaps Champagne Flutes for Martini Glasses

Even as the Financial Times announces excellent bottom-line numbers, the heat it’s feeling from the diverse and growing competition in business news is palpable. The FT may be 127 years old and roundly and rightfully respected for its journalism. But it doesn’t even break into the top 25 ...

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The Newsonomics of the Piano/Press+ Merger, Creating the World’s Largest Paywall Tech Company

 How fast has the paywall revolution swept the daily newspaper world? This adoption of charging for digital access took flight as the New York Times pioneered its general news pay model in 2011, and the rest is history: half of U.S. dailies and as many as 20 percent of European dailies have ...

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The Newsonomics of Scripps’ TV Paywall & the Last Man Standing Theory of Local Media

First published at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab   How much would you pay for online access to Ron Burgundy — or at least the Ron Burgundys of Cincinnati? In an industry-shaking move, E.W. Scripps’ WCPO.TV — that’s the website of Cincinnati’s ABC affiliate — is putting up a paywall ...

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As Digital First Media Announces Its Paywalls, 41% of US Dailies Will Soon Have Them

Even the paywall contrarians are coming around. John Paton’s Digital First Media will announce today its adoption of metered paywalls at all its Media News and Journal Register sites. That’s more than 75 papers, including big ones in Denver, San Jose, L.A., Salt Lake City (among the ...

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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 Time and Money, and Google Surveys

Welcome to the emerging world of value exchange. It’s not a new idea; value exchange has been used in the gaming world for a long time. As the Zyngas have figured out, only a small percentage of people will pay to play games. So they’ve long used interactive ads, quizzes, surveys, and more as ...

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The Newsonomics of Pulitzers, Paywalls, and Investing in the Newsroom

Let’s look then at the newsonomics of Pulitzers, paywalls, and investing in newsrooms, and think about whether our intuition has any basis in provable fact. If even 20 percent of expense devoted to newsroom seems like a low number, consider that the industry average is about 12.7 percent for ...

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The Newsonomics of Why Paywalls Now?

Why paywalls now? Why weren’t paywalls put into place in 2007, or 2002, or 1997? Might such paywalls have prevented the massive loss of reporting that local papers — and local readers — have suffered? Would they have saved a good number of the more than 15,000 newsroom jobs (a 28 percent ...

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The Newsonomics of the Digital-Only Paywall Parade

How much do top-echelon journalists need media brands? How much do brands need top-echelon journalists? The timing of pay initiatives from Andrew Sullivan and from The Daily Beast will provide a great picture into those questions. One way we’ll see how that contest goes is in comparing the ...

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