About half of the audience (for online media) is composed of casual users dropping by less than 3 times a month, or sent by search engines; 25% come more than 10 times a month.
News organization have implemented (paid) systems in different gradations. At the far end of the spectrum, we have the Times of London: no access to the site without first paying. That’s is the riskiest option. The site ends up losing 90% of its audience (and the related advertising revenue) but hopes to offset the loss by gathering enough online subscribers. Others choose to give some of the site for free and put the most valuable contents — sometimes the digital version of the print edition — behind a paywall. This doesn’t always make economical sense as many readers are happy enough with the free content part. The most successful paywall implementation has been the Wall Street Journal: it now has more than 1m paid subscribers, but it took 10 years to get there. The third option involves a metered system. The principle is simple: once you’ve seen a certain number of stories in a given period of time, you need to become a paid subscriber to keep viewing the site. Some newspapers have been quite successful at deploying such a metered system.
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