Regional news publisher Iliffe Media has rolled out a metered paywall strategy across its network.
Iliffe had already implemented metered paywalls on its sites in Newbury, New Milton and Stratford.
At the start of October it rolled out the strategy for the rest of its sites, moving from an in-house system to the Piano platform.
Subscribers see a premium version of the sites with most of the advertising removed, plus some extra exclusive content and access to the archives.
Native content, affiliate articles and BBC-funded local democracy reporter coverage will all remain free, as will “anything where we think it would be morally wrong to paywall it,” chief operating officer Ian Carter told Press Gazette. For example, he said, stories with emergency information or seeing information about a missing child would remain free: “So editors absolutely have the freedom to decide if content should be excluded from the paywall model.”
The number of free articles users will get under the metered paywall “varies vastly” depending on the site, Carter said.
For Iliffe’s larger, county-wide websites – Kent Online, Suffolk News, Lincs Online – people will continue to be able to access about 30 to 40 free articles per month.
Kent Online charges £4.99 per month for a Digital+ subscription, discounted down to £24.89 if readers pay 12 months up front.
Kent Online gets about 2.5 million users per month, according to Ipsos iris. Carter said: “That can be profitable on its own. We want to try and protect in the region of 95% of the advertising revenue that free website delivers.
“So on those sites we’re really targeting the highest engaged readers, so probably 5% of people will be asked to pay, 95% of that will remain free to access. So it’s a blended model for those big sites, mostly free for most people, most engaged readers are asked to subscribe.”
Meanwhile, on smaller sites covering towns like Bishop’s Stortford and Newark, users will only be able to read about five articles per month before being asked to subscribe.
Carter said: “If you look at a title like Bishop’s Stortford Independent, which is a fairly small town in Hertfordshire, I don’t think there’s a hope in hell you can have a free-to-access website that will be viable in the long run.
“You either have to expand your footprint and start covering areas outside of your traditional area, or you have to take a different approach. And we’ve chosen to take a different approach.”
Explaining the new paywalls to readers
Carter said reaction in Bishop’s Stortford has been “extremely positive” because editor Paul Winspear “knows the market intimately”.
“Elsewhere, reactions been less positive, which isn’t entirely surprising, because nobody likes being asked to pay. If you engage with people and you explain the reasons, you can win some of them round.”
Kent Online posted on its Facebook page on Friday to explain the new strategy after receiving concerns from readers.
It stressed that the “vast majority” of content will remain free: “We appreciate we are in a cost-of-living crisis and that it is important people continue to have access to news.”
It also set out to explain the economics of the news business in 2024 to readers: “Newspaper circulation is effectively subsidising the cost of running news websites. Understandably, more and more people prefer to get their news on their phones, and we have to plan for an eventual future without print.
“The only alternative is to run ever more intrusive advertising formats – which we know people hate – or tell reporters to focus on churning out quick and easy stories to generate more clicks. We would prefer to take a different approach as we think Kent deserves the best coverage we can provide.
“Asking those who make the most use of our service to make a small contribution is, we hope, the fairest approach. Under our current offer, it works out at less than 7p a day.”
The post added: “We read the comments people make about clickbait or stories being taken from social media. We take it on the chin, but you know what? It’s not true. Google and Facebook won’t staff magistrate and crown courts as we do every day to ensure people can see justice being done, they won’t spend hours on the phone trying to get answers out of council press officers, nor will they be sending a reporter from Kent to Yorkshire to cover the Bradford v Gillingham match on a cold Saturday in October.”
Similarly the Bishop’s Stortford Independent told readers that since its launch seven years ago, “the combined effects of Covid, cost-of-living crisis, the rise in prices of energy and raw materials for printing newspapers, and the growth of the global tech giants have hit our newspaper sales and advertising revenues really hard. We are not alone in this regard.
“We are still going, but we need to establish a more secure financial footing if we are to celebrate our 8th birthday and beyond – and we can only do that with your support.”
The post added that sales of its weekly newspaper “continue to slide” but that there are “no plans to cease its publication”. Meanwhile its website, it said, “goes from strength to strength”.
Despite some of the reaction Carter said: “It’s very, very, very early days, but at this stage we are ahead of where we expected to be on both the big sites and the small sites.
“Some of the small sites are significantly ahead of where we wanted to be by some margin.”
Highland News and Media, a Scottish-based publisher which is partly owned by Iliffe, launched its own digital paywalls in September 2021 after participating in an FT Strategies workshop aimed at helping publishers build a digital subscriptions strategy. It signed up more than 3,000 paying subscribers in its first 16 months, equating to about 13% of its total print readers.
Why free websites make more sense for Reach than Iliffe
Carter told Press Gazette that Iliffe now has at least 15 meaningful revenue sources coming into the business including the traditional advertising and circulation revenues as well as digital subscriptions, affiliates, tech funding, audio and events. He added that digital subscriptions are unlikely to become the main source of revenue.
Iliffe Media turnover fell from £16.7m to £14.8m in the year to 31 March 2023, but losses before tax were down 12% from £2m to £1.8m, and operating losses reduced by 19% from £1.1m to £885,050.
Around the time that Iliffe’s new paywall strategy went live, the chief executive of major regional publisher Reach, Jim Mullen, said they had “run multiple tests on paywalls on some of our titles, and it just doesn’t work for us”.
Carter said Iliffe’s portfolio is vastly different from Reach which owns some of the UK’s biggest regional newsbrands.
“Every publisher has to decide its own strategy and I think if you’re Reach and you’ve got titles with the heritage of, you know, the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Birmingham Live, and you can reach really, really huge audiences., you can see why a free-to-access model makes sense for them.
“It doesn’t make sense in a portfolio where you’ve got a cluster of small market towns like Newmarket, Bishop’s Stortford, Stratford-upon-Avon, that model doesn’t work there, and it can’t work there, so it’s horses for courses.”
Reach’s Mullen also objected to paywalls on principle, saying “if we don’t have free local news in these communities, then we’re diluting democracy”.
But Carter said: “Our papers have been charging for news for 300 years in some cases, so I don’t think it’s completely impossible to expect the UK public to pay for digital news either.”
Carter added that Iliffe’s current move is planned as a long-term strategy and is no longer in the experimental stage.
“We’re definitely in it for the long haul when it comes to asking a cohort of audience to pay for content. How big that cohort is, is what we’re testing and experimenting with. But there won’t be a rollback on asking people to pay for content.”
The UK’s second largest regional news group, Newsquest, brings in around £6m per year in revenue from more than 100,000 digital subscribers. As with Iliffe it charges £4.99 per month for premium access to its sites.
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