Newspapers online: The promiscuity problem | The Economist
..."If one newspaper starts charging, readers may migrate to those that remain free. If, on the other hand, a lot of papers begin charging at the same time, readers might be jostled into paying. This plan has always seemed optimistic. A study...

Roy Greenslade: Paywalls will restrict online newspaper promiscuity | Media | guardian.co.uk
"In what does amount to surprise - a surprise to me - is how little readers rely on online news aggregators"; "when Guardian readers were asked whether they would pay £2 a month to read their favourite paper online, 26% said yes. But if...

Newspapers online: The promiscuity problem | The Economist
The theory underlying most papers’ online strategies is that people will buy a favourite newspaper and then go to its website for breaking news and extras such as blogs. But fans of the Daily Telegraph, for example, the most popular quality daily...

Are the winds blowing in the direction of paid content, targeted advertising and better journalism?
Free does not mean that content has no value, but when the very sustenance of the entity producing that content is in danger, the concept of “free” begins to edge closer to devaluing content.But even if content online has been free for so long, if...

Registration/subscription sites : Technical Requirements - Google News (publishers) Help
The easiest way to do this is to configure your webservers to not serve the registration when our crawlers visit your pages (when the User-Agent is "Googlebot-News"). It is equally important that your robots.txt file allows access by...

Where does the paywall go? | Kiesow 7.0
The paywall debate has been preciously short of actual numbers and examinations of reader behavior.

World Press’ Collective Delusion Boils Over: Respect Us, Dammit | paidContent
..."we haven’t made copyright work properly on the web, and that is down to we content creators who have perhaps foolishly failed to enforce our copyright - although let’s not forget that reaching the biggest possible audience is a noble goal...

Google News Blog: Google and paid content
"Participating publishers allow the crawler to index their subscription content, then allow users who find one of those articles through Google News or Google Search to see the full page without requiring them to register or subscribe. The...

Thinking about a paywall? Read this first
"It's small, but that's deceptive. That lump accounts for a big chunk of your website's traffic, because the people in that lump visit several times a week, maybe every day, maybe two or three times in a single day. When the visit,...