The Globe to roll out metered paywall as industry shifts to digital revenue

Well it looks like I'll be reading the several articles a week that I've gone to the Globe for somewhere else.

I wish them good luck with it. As much as getting free news appeals to me, it's not a sustainable business model. You can't continue to give away a quality product for free. This is simply the way things have to move.

Another successful model is the free print dailies they have the moajor cities now--Metro and such. Designed for people who want to be updated on the fly.

I can only speak as a reader - I didn't like it before (not that long ago) when the Globe was one of the few papers you could barely read online without a subscription. Now they're going back to that model and it's unfortunate. I would probably tolerate more annoying animated advertising to continue reading, but I don't see why I would pay to read the Globe online when there are so many other options.

Have to admit I won't be paying for the online service either. Hardly worth while when there are so many other credible news sources out there. When I post news here I usually use them because they link better than others like the NP, but that will be changing. They have a ton of ads you need to watch before you see the story already and I think that's the route they should have expanded. I looked a few pages of comments on the GM site and all that I read said "Goodbye."

I go to the Globe and Mail a lot, but I won't pay for it. There's always going to be free news sites that will be just as good.

It seems to me that the Globe could be shooting itself in the foot, particularly if other news outlets follow other business models and keep an open door.

Here's an interesting aspect:



I wonder if CKA can be considered a "social media site"? Probably not, and if not, the CKA Newsbot will be cut off from Globe access as well.

Are you a communist, or do you just sorta like the "shock value" of it?

I'm guessing the second, but just askin'.

I feel for newspapers - they desperately need a new business model and can't seem to find one. With Craiglist and Kijiji eating the classified biz, they need some new revenue stream to make them sustainable. Probably the only way a paywall will work is if all newspapers go to it - but I have no doubt some will stay open and free to be competitive and attract more eyeballs.

With everything available today, do people actually use the papers for news? I know I don't....I watch the evening news as I don't see much point in getting news a day late.

With that said, I read the papers for opinion and other insight beyond just news.

I have a digital subscription to the Toronto Sun right now which costs me $5 a month which I can access on my iPad, Playbook or my PC. I typically sit and eat breakfast and read the paper on the iPad. It's instant and downloads for me every morning.

http://www.pressreader.com/

I get my news from here. All of it. I don't read papers, I don't watch TV. I find the insights of a few here frankly more honest than most of the dreck I read on the opinion page in the Globe and Mail and other publications.

I won't miss the G&M. It's a good paper, relative to others, but it's pretty Toronto-centric too.

The key point in your statement is "give away a quality product for free." Newspapers are under the misconception that "news" is their product. It isn't. Newspapers are in the business of selling a community, you and me, to advertisers. That has always been their business, the news portion is simply what is there to foster that community.

Putting up a paywall has been shown time and time again to limit the size of your audience. Limited eyeballs on your site isn't going to lead to greater investment in advertising. Newspapers should be doing everything in their power to create the largest community as possible on their sites, not the opposite.

Excellent point. It actually answers something I've been thinking about for quite some time. While just about everything is "free" on the internet, from Facebook, to Hotmail to the Globe and Mail, I've noticed that the "price" we pay is personal information. Every time, for example, you want to do soemthing cool with your Facebook account--say tie it to another app for convenience--all tehy ask for is a peek at this, and send your friends that, etc.

from your vantage point of the business model of papers--media in general you could say, I guess--this makes sense.

I think that what the old-style newspapers have over most of the web based news, for now, is credibility. Although we all know that most papers lean one way or another and we always have to be on the look-out for bias, we don't actually expect outright falsehoods in our newspapers.

i think(hope?) that one of the few avenues they have to remain relevant is to foster the idea that they can be trusted. They'll have to get ever more carefull about their fact checking and really start to watch for bias if they want it to work though. That's a best case scenario imo