Wednesday
Nov042009
How Many Paying Subscribers Does an Online Newspaper Need?
Adam Levy | Wednesday, November 4, 2009 at 12:30PM 
In order to create a sustainable business model, newspapers need only to get 3-4% of the their online readers to pay for content, a British Private Equity firm reports.
Dharmash Mistry at Balderton Capital believes that this modest paying audience could cover a newspapers’ entire advertising budget.
“On a like-for-like basis, if newspapers convert an order of magnitude of 3% to 4% unique users to a pay model – at roughly £3 a month or 10% of the monthly price of buying print editions daily – you could probably generate as much in revenue as is being made from total online ad revenue currently.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/03/dharmash-mistry-newspapers-paid-content
tagged Britain, online newspapers | in Industry, International
Britain, online newspapers | in Industry, International 
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Reader Comments (1)
(a) One of the great fallacies in any business model is to say "if we can only get X percent of the market to pay Y pounds a month we can make a go of this enterprise." The numbers look low, it all appears to be plausible, but there is actually NO PLAN there as to how or why X percent will pay Y pounds. So, FAIL on that score.
(b) Even if there were a plan, generating from readers an equivalent of the current online ad revenue doesn't really solve the problem, does it. Especially if it comes at the expense of the ad revenue itself because you've imposed a paywall of some kind. FAIL, again.