The Toronto Star, Canada’s largest-selling daily newspaper, has begun charging its readers for content from today.
The digital subscription comes into effect once readers have accessed more than ten free articles on the website. A month’s full digital access will cost 99 cents (63p), but afterwards subscribers must pay $9.99 (£6.30) a month.
Toronto residents who sign up for digital access will also receive free home delivery of the paper, the Globe and Mail reported.
The paper’s parent company Torstar Corp has already trialled the metered paywall at its other titles, including the Hamilton Spectator and the Waterloo Region Record.
The broadsheet has the highest circulation of any newspaper in Canada, at around 357,000 copies a day in 2012. Torstar Corp nevertheless announced a drop in profits of 44 per cent in the second quarter at the end of July. The media company attributed the fall to a decline in newspaper revenues, together with a slump in sales at Harlequin, the company’s book publishing division.
In April this year the Telegraph became the latest UK newspaper to adopt a metered paywall, charging £2 a week to readers who want to read more than 20 articles a week. So far the paywall appears to have had little impact on the paper's headline digital ABC figures.
The Financial Times has had a metered online paywall in place since 2007. It currently limits free access to seven articles per month and now claims to have more than 340,000 paying digital subscribers.
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