After Three Months, Only 35 Subscriptions for Newsday's Web Site
In late October, Newsday, the Long Island daily that the Dolans bought for $650 million, put its web site, newsday.com, behind a pay wall. The paper was one of the first non-business newspapers to take the plunge by putting up a pay wall …
Context & Ripple Effects
Newsday was one of the first general-interest US dailies to charge for its web site when the Dolan family — which had paid $650 million for the Long Island paper — put newsday.com behind a pay wall in late October. The move landed mid-debate: the New York Times had spent 2009 weighing a paid web subscription, with Bloomberg reporting a possible $5 monthly access fee under consideration.
The 35-subscriber figure lands on an old fault line. The 2007 discussion around newspaper pay walls had already settled on a working theory — readers will pay for niche or business content, while general news faces free alternatives — and the Read/WriteWeb critique at the time argued the wall itself was only half the problem. Newsday is now the first clean test of that theory for a metro daily.
First-order effects
- The Dolans' pay-wall bet has produced essentially no direct revenue: 35 subscriptions against a $650 million acquisition means newsday.com's paid tier is commercially irrelevant in its first quarter.
- Every publisher then considering charging — most prominently the New York Times, which had been publicly weighing a fee since March 2009 — just received its first real-world datapoint on what a general-interest metro audience will pay.
Second-order effects
- Competitors eyeing subscriptions must now differentiate their pitch from Newsday's failed one — bundling print, pricing below print rates, or metering rather than hard-walling — because the flat 'pay to read' model has a public failure attached to it.
- For Newsday itself, the economics push back toward advertising and toward leveraging cable/bundle distribution through the Dolans' Cablevision ownership, since standalone web subscriptions cannot carry the site.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry splits along the 2007 lines: niche, financial, and specialty publishers sustain pay walls while general-interest metros treat web subscriptions as unviable at scale, forcing consolidation of metro news into bundled or owner-subsidized models.
- A widely cited flop becomes the reference case regulators, advertisers, and investors use to discount 'charge for content' strategies, raising the bar of proof any future newspaper pay wall must clear.
The trend: Newspapers are running live experiments in charging for general-interest news online, and Newsday's near-empty subscriber rolls mark the first hard evidence that commodity local news resists pay walls built for niche content.