Steven Brill’s Journalism Online experiment, which developed a system that allows newspapers to charge their most regular online visitors, has analyzed its preliminary data and found on average that advertising revenue and overall traffic did not decline significantly despite predictions otherwise. The sample size of Journalism Online’s data was small — about two dozen mostly small- and medium-size papers that had been charging readers for several months — so divining any potential pattern for large newspapers is difficult.
But the initial findings showed that newspapers found success with a pay model by setting a conservative limit for the number of articles visitors could read free each month, and by making clear that most readers would not be affected. L. Gordon Crovitz, a former Wall Street Journal publisher who is helping run the project, said one lesson to be taken from the numbers so far is that readers were willing to pay for some, but not all, content online. Consumers “will pay for the few news brands they really rely on, if they use them a lot,” he said.
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