When I began poking around telegram.com Saturday morning, I wasn’t sure how many clicks I had remaining of the 10 that I was entitled to as a registered (but not subscribed) member of the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette’s newly metered site.
After click number 25 or so — it may have been staff writer Bill Ballou’s account of the Jays’ 16-2 trouncing of the Red Sox — I began to suspect the Telegram & Gazette of tweaking the meter.
Publisher Bruce Gaultney confirmed by e-mail that “being able to turn the meter up and down is an advantage of the system,” but he and online director Mark Henderson said they’d made no such adjustment yet.
No matter. Whatever explains my experience, the extra clicks underline a key strength of the metered approach: The ability to adjust the meter however makes sense to manage the tension between revenue and reach.
Earlier pay wall had limited reach
The T&G has addressed this tension before, deciding in 2006 that the pay wall it had in place for the previous four years was limiting its reach, according to Henderson.
With the entire site restricted only to subscribers, Henderson said, “We weren’t reaching enough people — we thought we weren’t growing enough outside our typical subscriber base.”
When Gaultney arrived as publisher that year, he tore down that wall, telling a T&G reporter at the time that “it certainly wasn’t working for us.”
In retrospect, he said, the 2,100 online-only subscribers back then (2-3 percent of print circulation) doesn’t look so bad. But he said he much prefers the meter to the wall.
“Our main goals are to get our home delivery customers to register for something of value — and to keep traffic up on the site.” – T&G Publisher Bruce GaultneyThe meter installed by the T&G on Aug. 16 requires registration or subscription after just two clicks per month on content created by Telegram & Gazette staffers.
Wire copy, advertising, almost all obits (regarded as advertising since readers pay for and write them, with few exceptions) and reader-produced blogs are not counted by the meter and remain free. Photos — staff-produced and otherwise — as well as material from the paper’s locally-zoned weeklies and TelegramTowns.com are also exempt.
Subscribers to the printed newspaper get free access to all online content, but only if they take the time to register. Nonsubscribers can buy online access for $14.95 a month, which also includes home delivery of the print edition if customers choose to accept it. Day passes cost $1.
Unlike the kind of blunt pay walls that the Tallahassee Democrat and other papers have installed recently, a metered approach provides publishers with more flexibility.
The Worcester meter restricts access to content that drives somewhat less than half of the site’s traffic, according to Henderson. It represents a bigger gamble on paid content than, say, the Lancaster, Pa., paper’s decision to meter obits, which account for roughly 5 percent of its content. (In the Lancaster setup, only out-of-area users get charged.) But it also reflects the T&G’s interest in preserving and expanding its reach as much as possible.
“Our main goals,” Gaultney told me in a half-hour phone chat last week, “are to get our home delivery customers to register for something of value — and to keep traffic up on the site.”
By early Wednesday morning when we spoke, he said: “Both of those things are happening at rates greater than I thought they would.”
Shifting subscribers’ mindset
The T&G is trying to shift the mindset of its print subscribers (71,000 weekdays and 81,000 Sunday) so they think of T&G content as something they pay for regardless of platform, sort of like paying a utility bill for water that flows into the bathtub as well as the kitchen sink.
It’s not quite the same, of course. Finding alternative online sources of news about Worcester is probably a good bit easier than figuring out another way to fill my tub.
Despite the risks, the T&G strategy has interesting potential, especially if the paper can eventually migrate those paying customers from print products, which cost a lot to produce and deliver, to much cheaper digital platforms.
And if the paper can also increase overall paid circulation by 2 or 3 percent by adding online-only subscribers, so much the better.
The trick, of course, is doing all this without losing so much traffic (the reach problem created by the old pay wall) that advertising revenue takes a big hit.
That’s where the meter comes in. If monthly unique visitors and page views are down, just dial it back to permit more clicks before the gate closes and the system requires registration or payment. Or at least that’s the idea — how it will really work remains to be seen.
Though the Telegram & Gazette’s approach is similar to that of Journalism Online’s Press+ system, the paper used Clickshare and Saxotech, the two vendors who built the earlier pay wall system for the paper.
I had stopped counting by the time the Telegram & Gazette put a stop to my freeloading Saturday, but I’m guessing it was somewhere north of 30 clicks.
From the point of view of managing a customer like me — out of the area, unlikely to become a paying subscriber — the paper could afford to be generous with a few extra clicks. I already had been persuaded to register and provide my ZIP code (the kind of information advertisers crave), as well as my daytime phone number, which I trust the paper will not use to make me more valuable to anyone at all.
When I spoke with Henderson after the meter had been in place for a couple of days, he said “thousands” of print subscribers registered for online access during the meter’s first two days. When I asked how many nonsubscribers the paper had won over — via free registration or subscription fees — he wouldn’t get any more specific than “less than a thousand.”
In a brief chat Saturday afternoon, Henderson declined to provide additional numbers.
T&G meter “not a pilot for the Times”
Gaultney said he recognizes that the meter will diminish overall traffic, but he said he believes the meter will avoid “crashing traffic to the point that we need to be concerned about it.”
The site attracts about 800,000 unique users per month, according to Henderson. That has remained stable in recent months, and advertisers will be interested to see what happens with the meter in place.
The Telegram & Gazette is owned by The New York Times Co., which has announced that its flagship paper will introduce a metered pay model for nytimes.com in January 2011.
Gaultney said he and his colleagues consulted with corporate in creating their metered system for Worcester, but stressed, “This is not a pilot for the Times.” The differences between a local paper and the Times’ national reach, he said, suggest quite different uses for metered charging.
I came away from my conversations with Gaultney and Henderson with a few unresolved questions, perhaps worth considering by sites working on various forms of online pay schemes:
Why not engage users publicly in a discussion of your plans?
Last Monday’s letter to readers about the new charges, from Gaultney and editor Leah M. Lamson, generated 335 comments by the weekend, mostly negative. That feedback was met with silence from the paper.
Gaultney said the staff talked about engaging users in the comments area, but added, “I guess our view was that, as we watched it happen, it was sort of self-correcting. We saw our own readers getting in there and saying things we would have said [in defense of the meter]. So we decided there was no need for us to do it.”
Maybe, but I’m not convinced. I much prefer the approach taken by John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., who regularly mixes it up with readers in the comments area of his blog.
I recognize the risk of engaging with anonymous commenters intent on ranting. But especially when the majority of them are either registered or paying subscribers, isn’t it time to engage them directly — and publicly?
Why not offer some new value to users in exchange for the new fees?
Gaultney says the T&G has already created substantial value for its readers: all that local content created by T&G staffers. Fair enough, except that readers got it all free one day and had to pay for it (or register for it) the next.
In an age when so much new value can be created by smart aggregation, linking and packaging, why pass up the opportunity to do so? If you’re going to ask previously nonpaying customers to start paying, why not give them all the incentives you can?
Most importantly, given their paramount importance to the paper’s bottom line during this transitional period, why not provide current print subscribers with irresistible reasons to register for online access?
If newspapers really are as indispensable to their communities as they claim, they’re going to have to prove it online as well as in print.
