The great News experiment begins
by Margaret Simons
So the great experiment begins. As expected, today at the Mumbrella360 conference News Limited’s Richard Freudenstein announced that the company’s Australian newspapers will erect paywalls for some of their content online.

As reported in The Australian today, the experiment will begin in October with The Australian. As yet undefined “premium” content will go behind the paywall, while “breaking news, wire stories and broad interest stories” will remain free.

The price of a digital subscription will be $2.95 a week, including iPad and Android app, website and mobile site, and you will be able to get all this plus a print subscription for $7.95 a week. Compare this to The Age iPad app, which will cost $9 a month from the end of this year. The packages are not directly comparable — you get more on more platforms with the Oz — but the Oz is also the more expensive by a whisker.

Freudenstein claimed in his speech that The Times paywall experiment in the UK has been a success — that there is more revenue from the smaller number of paying audience members than there was from advertising playing to a mass audience.

But in Australia, he said, the mix of paid and free content has been adopted because Australian media websites make more money from ads. The free content is designed to draw that revenue, and also to act as a marketing device for the subscription content.

Perhaps. I suspect the “freemium” model (where did they get that word?) is also a reaction to the more sophisticated experiment introduced by The New York Times — the porous, metered approach to paywalls, about which I have written before.

So will it work?

So far only The Australian has a firm date for the erection of the paywall. The tabloids will follow, we are told, but there are no dates or details.

This is logical. If News Limited has a product that is special enough to attract subscribers online, then the Oz is it. No matter what we think of its recent odd and singular history, its self-obsession and its weird and nasty campaigns, (some in the industry are saying that The Age in Melbourne would sell 10,000 fewer copies if The Australian was less weird)  The Australian also contains high quality content and serious commentary that cannot be easily obtained elsewhere.

But is it special enough? Nobody, including News Limited insiders, knows for sure.