I’ve meant to write about this for a long time, but never quite got around to it. if you know me, you’ll be aware that I often curate articles that I think will be of interest to my many followers.
I look for the best articles and don’t particularly care where they come from as long as they have good information that my readers and followers are interested in. Several newspapers like the Washington Post and New York Times have paywalls and once you have opened a certain number of articles, they won’t let you view any more unless you pay. Yes, it is only $1 on the offer in the picture above. But I’m not getting paid for my blog stories and if I subscribed to each paywalled publication I curate from, it would get expensive.
The thing is, I don’t want to, or need to subscribe to their paper, but because I can’t easily link to an article once I reach their arbitrary limit, I stop sharing their great stories. This is an example. It’s CES time and many of my readers are excited about GPS and location based gadgets, looking to my social media and blogs for articles about cool new tech. They won’t get a link to the story in this picture frome me.
If you are in the newspaper industry you might want to think about other ways to get people to subscribe and pay for news services. I understand the reason you have paywalls, but maybe there are better ways to manage them.
As an example, the NZ Herald provides all the stories for free, but if you want the backstory or more in depth information, you can subscribe and get print and more digital info. That’s much smarter in my book. What do you think?
SoLoMo Consulting 