7 Jun 2013

Fairfax Australia to launch website paywalls

9:05 am on 7 June 2013

Fairfax Media says its flagship online Australian publications will go behind a paywall from early next month, and its New Zealand publications will follow.

The Australasian media company says the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age websites will launch metered paywalls on 2 July.

Readers will have access to 30 free articles a month but will have to pay for more.

In New Zealand both Fairfax and New Zealand Herald publisher APN are expected to introduce paywalls but neither have given details.

A media studies lecturer at AUT says only the likes of Google are making big money from online ads.

Merja Mullylahti has researched paywalls around the world and says so far they are only contributing a fraction to total newpaper revenues.

"For example in New York Times the paywalls create roughly 7.2% of the company's total circulation revenue, and if that's the case it's not even one tenth of its revenue.

"In the short term they are not on their own viable business models."

Ms Mullylahti says newspapers are still experimenting and often remove the charges when there are major news events, to attract more viewers.

But she says newspapers need to find ways of making money at the times when people most want to read the news.

Ms Mullylahti says the online newspaper industry is experimenting desperately because it doesn't make enough money to keep newsrooms running and pay for journalists.

She says the paywall is one type of evolving business model, and in the future the newspapers will need to find a variety of sources for their income.

Ms Mullylahti says the New Zealand Listener and the National Business Review are the only New Zealand publishers charging to view their online editions.

She says National Business Review makes around $500,000 a year from its paywall, with almost half of subscribers reading content online.