but, strictly speaking as a consumer, I must say their paywall is completely out of touch with the way I want to pay for news consumption. I don't mind paying 5c or even 10c per article, but I'm certainly not going to sign up to pay 120$ for 6 months, if I'm only going to read 1 or 2 articles here and there. but since they've done it this way, I can only conclude that most consumers prefer it that way.
- Average age: 40+
- Average household income: 250k+
- Average household net worth: 1.5m+
From http://www.wsjmediakit.com/files/uploads/201410/2016_WSJcom_....
http://www.wsjmediakit.com/files/uploads/201410/WSJ.com%20Au...
Also, this is the _actual_ audience not their _target_ audience.
Why do you think the content has gotten worse?
They used to ask important questions, investigate them thoroughly and then make the case for a particular conclusion. You could agree or disagree, but now it's often just an exercise in careful fence sitting, in "being sensible", even on matters where taking a principled stand is the obvious thing to do.
That said, I'm not entirely certain if it's me who has changed or The Economist or both.
Unfortunately I live in Australia so most stuff in WSJ I don't care about. (And we have the ABC)
wsj in particular had some rather absurd hit pieces on bernie sanders.
I tried it for a few months and was happy, but found out I don't have time to read articles in full anyway. I'm sure it will work for someone else though.
What amount would be close to the value they make from ad revenue?
Micropayment approaches and payment processor rates vary, but I'd generalize to probably 30% take rate. So assume 3.5¢ to 7¢ payment per article. Do you pay for every article you load? Do you pay again if you load the article twice? What if you don't like the article and don't want to pay? I don't think it's quite as simple as 3.5¢ to 7¢ because no one has really proven this model to work yet.
YOu read the first free paragraph, if you like that you pay, if you dont like the rest of the article you dont get a refund since you have already consumed the article.
Just because something cost a lot to make, doesn't mean it's worth a lot. Sorry.
But, how do you know how much value I'm getting from that news source? I usually get my news from many different sources. And sometimes, I don't even read the entire article. Only a small percentage of the articles are actually of interest to me.
Subscription feels like monogamy, I've got lots of different things to spend cash on, I don't want to commit at this scale to spending it on things I may not want.
I suggest you try to find a substitute for those entertainment pennies. If you can, and that item is "free", good for you. But I doubt 5 or 10 cents gets you much.
Not to mention that 15 minutes is a very generous estimate, the median is probably closer to 3-5 minutes. Given that the article isn't written for me, that sounds rather fair for accessing it. A print subscription to the WSJ is $400/yr or $1.30/issue, and if I spend an hour reading it that comes out to 6 to 11 cents for a 3-to-5-minute article.
Journalism has always been about advertisers and scale. The problem now is lowered barriers to entry drove up supply, reducing advertising $ available to "real journalism" and entities like nyt and wsj still have vestigial anchors pulling them down further.
Couple that with growing adblocking and it's a bad recipe. How do you put that genie back in the bottle? The net effect has been lowered standards by former standouts in a race to the bottom. I don't see a fix, much less an easy one.