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Newsday Gains 35 Paid Subscribers... After Three Months

by Amar Toor on January 27, 2010 at 10:24 AM

Well so much for that idea...

The future of paid digital newspapers took a major blow yesterday, when the New York Observer reported that Newsday's attempt to charge online readers had officially failed -- miserably. Since first introducing its pay structure last October, the Long Island newspaper has managed to scrape together a grand total of 35 subscriptions. Not exactly a home run, especially considering the bread that went into overhauling the site. Sine the Dolan family bought the newspaper, the company has poured some $4 million into the site's redesign. With those 35 people paying $5 a month (or $260 a year) for total access to the site, Newsday's seen about $9,000 so far. Yikes.


However, anyone with Optimum Cable TV (also owned by the Dolans) gets free access to the site, and Newsday officials claim that about 75-percent of Long Island subscribes to Optimum. And according to some of the paper's reporters, even publisher Terry Jimenez didn't have high hopes for the paid content plan, allegedly saying that the gang of 35 subscribers was "35 more than I would have thought it would have been." Even so, the site's traffic has dropped off steeply since the fee was introduced, slumping down to 1.5 million unique hits in December from 2.2 million that October.

Clearly, Newsday's got a lot of internal dysfunction to address, and not just a failed attempt at an online subscription program. Not only is the paper's work environment unpleasant enough to warrant the employee-coined nickname of "Hellville," it's currently embroiled in a heated labor dispute as well. So, while you can't really consider Newsday to be an accurate microcosm of the national newspaper landscape, it's pretty clear that other newspapers boarding the paid bandwagon had better do so with caution. If a newspaper is going to successfully charge online readers, it'll have to do a better job of marketing itself, and, more importantly, of differentiating its publication from the innumerable free ones. [From: The New York Observer; via: The Awl]

Tags: deathofprint, newsday, newspaper, online newspapers, OnlineNewspapers, subscription, top

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