http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/oct/30/sun-website-to-scrap-paywall
The Sun, that was once under a paywall, has now decided to scrap the idea and offers the majority of their content for free. The Sun's publisher, News UK, who also publishes the Times and the Sunday Times, have come to a decision to increase revenue through online advertising, similarly to major competitors such as Daily Mail. This change in strategy will take place on November 30th which also happens to be Cyber Monday which is one of the best-performing days of the year for online retail. Other than choosing to rid the paywall, other events that has occurred for the Sun include the political site SunNation winning plaudits at election time and entering platform partnerships with Apple News. The Sun has viewed their period of having a paywall, very helpful as they have become more aware of what their audiences want and how they should provide for the demand.
- News UK made the decision to put the Sun, the UK’s biggest-selling tabloid, behind a paywall in August 2013
- The Sun reported more than 30 million monthly unique users in July 2013
- The Sun have a record 1.25m customers signing up to be managers and their content has reached 276m people on social media.
- Since relaxing its paywall strategy the Sun has increased its average daily browser numbers to about 1 million.
- The national newspaper market has seen unprecedented falls of up to 30% in print advertising this summer
As there are many sources for readers to find their news from, many of the audience would rather visit free news sites rather than one in which a subscription is needed. Therefore, the Sun's choice to dismiss the paywall will be avery beneficial one as they may steadily gain their lost audience and earn more revenue through advertising. Like the article states, the period that they were a paywall has given them a lot of information on the new audience who prefer to make good use of the free information that can be found on the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment