Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users

To understand newspapers’ 15-year attachment to paywalls, you have to understand “Everyone must pay!” not just as an economic assertion, but as a cultural one. Though the journalists all knew readership would plummet if their paper dropped imported content like Dear Abby or the funny pages, they never really had to know just how few people were reading about the City Council or the water main break. Part of the appeal of paywalls, even in the face of their economic ineffectiveness, was preserving this sense that a coupon-clipper and a news junkie were both just customers, people whose motivations the paper could serve in general, without having to understand in particular. The article threshold has often been discussed as if it was simply a new method of getting readers to pay, to which the reply has to be “Yes, except for most of them.” Calling article thresholds a “leaky” or “porous” paywall understates the enormity of the change; the metaphor of a leak suggests a mostly intact container that lets out a minority of its contents, but a paper that shares even two pages a month frees a majority of users from any fee at all. By the time the threshold is at 20 pages (a number fast becoming customary) a paper has given up on even trying to charge between 85% and 95% of its readers, and it will only convince a minority of that minority to pay. Read more here

How People Watch TV Online And Off

Nielsen estimates that almost 145 million people watch video online in the U.S., compared to about 290 million who watch traditional TV. So the penetration of online video is already about half of the overall TV-watching population. Yet for all the video people watch on the web, it is still a tiny fraction of how much they watch on TV in terms of time spent. In a report put out yesterday on the State of the Media summarizing 2011 data, Nielsen estimates Americans spend an average of 32 hours and 47 minutes a week watching traditional TV. They only spend an average of 3 hours and 58 minutes a week on the Internet, and only 27 minutes a week watching video online. All those billions of videos watched online still only represent 1.4 percent of the time spent watching traditional TV. Read more here

Magazine Ad Demand Falters

After a tentative recovery following the economic downturn in 2009, consumer magazines are seeing ad pages fall again, raising the possibility of a long-term, secular decline in the medium similar to their print cousins in the newspaper business. Total ad pages fell 8% from 50,578 in the fourth quarter of 2010 to 46,508 in the fourth quarter of 2011, according to the Publishers Information Bureau, while print advertising revenues (based on official rate card figures) declined 4.9% from $6.02 billion to $5.73 billion. Read more here

Big Three Newscasts Are Changing the State of Play

Influenced by cable and the Internet, the nightly newscasts are shaking up conventions that stretch back 50 years, seeking to distinguish themselves by picking different stories and placing them in different orders. On any given night, one might lead with the Republican campaign, another with extreme weather and the third with an exclusive interview. “The three evening newscasts have become more different from one another than at any time I can remember,” said Bill Wheatley, who worked at NBC News for 30 years and now teaches at Columbia. The differences provide a stark illustration of the state of the news media — much more fragmented than ever, but also arguably more creative. Read more at the NY Times

Holiday gifts of e-readers challenge publishing world

The latest USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list, based on sales data from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, shows a remarkable burst of digital book sales after e-readers were unwrapped as gifts -- for 42 of the top 50 titles, the e-book editions were the most popular format. The previous high, in July, was 25 of the top 50. One in five U.S. adults are reading e-books on a variety of devices, from dedicated e-readers to tablets (like the Kindle Fire) that can be used to download movies, music, video games and more. Forrester Research estimates that Amazon has sold 5 million Kindle Fires, priced at $199 each, since the device was released Nov. 14. Archrival Barnes & Noble has sold an estimated 2 million Nook Tablets ($249), released Nov. 17. Both devices are designed, in part, to compete with Apple's iPad (the latest versions are priced from $500 to $830), which sold about 40 million units last year. But even as the sales of e-books doubled from 10% of the overall market to 20% in 2011, print books still account for about 80% of the market. Overall print sales dropped about 9% in 2011. Read more here

Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November. The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. The Arieso survey found that 64 percent of extreme users were using a laptop, a third were using a smartphone and 3 percent had an iPad. Read more here.