The Columbus Dispatch (Ohio) charges for premium channel
Challenge: An early pay wall strategy walled off coverage of the leading Ohio sports team, the Buckeyes, and caused traffic to drop. Since the Buckeye's were widely covered by other online media, readers simply searched for coverage on other free sites. So the (Columbus) Dispatch.com dropped its paid access to do more customer research on how to create premium content that is monetizable without a significant affect on traffic.
Solution: The Dispatch.com is exploring partnership with a more unique local sports team, the Blue Jackets (the newspaper holding company is a partial owner). Unlike the BuckEyes, this team is not well covered by other media in Ohio. Some Blue Jackets coverage would go behind a premium wall, accessible for $40 a year. The Blue Jackets already have a loyal following on the site of 40,000 sports fans.
Located in Ohio’s capital, the newspaper also produces political content that has loyal followers. It also plans to move some coverage including the highly popular Dispatch Politics behind a pay wall. Associated blogs and daily political updates may land there as well.
Marketing executive Phil Pikelny says the company recognizes the advantage the capital city provides them. "Politics is information that people may be willing to pay for," he said. A market segmentation study also affirmed this, showing that visitors to political and sports sites had the least price sensitivity. “The challenge will fall to the editorial folks. It will be their job to create compelling, unique content, which some visitors will, hopefully, pay for."
The Dispatch Company is also looking at the tiered-access model, used by the Financial Times, for its main news site. Pikelny likes the idea of charging people who are heavy users but doing it in a way that least impacts page views and ad opportunity. "If we have enough niches that we are good at, we feel this may eventually add up to the (circulation) that we were used to.” He concludes, “We are coming to think that, as with our recent experience with Mather Economics and our print product, when you charge and lose some people, you are most likely getting rid of people who don't appreciate the brand and strengthening your relationship with people who do."
Results: Too soon to tell.
The author, Alisa Cromer is publisher of a variety of online media, including LocalMediaInsider and MediaExecsTech, developed while on a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute and which has evolved into a leading marketing company for media technology start-ups. In 2017 she founded Worldstir.com, an online magazine, to showcases perspectives from around the world on new topic each month, translated from and to the top five languages in the world.
