You shall not pass!

Interestingly News Ltd has put up a paywall for the Australian . This is old news, however they have recently opened up the distribution figures to scrutiny, although I would like to point out that B&T are wrong in combining the digital figures with the offline distribution to get the total distribution of " 154,697", as News Ltd offer a digital pass bundle with the physical paper, so there would be a lot of overlap there as well.

Anyway the official distribution for online is 31,241, which might sound like a lot but you have to consider that is for the entire country/internet, The Examiner in Tasmania has a physical distribution of 31,947, and the Australian is not a little paper, it's physical distribution is 135,115.

I'm sure News Limited and eternal optimists would tout this as a win for online journalism, and proof that you can get people to pay for online journalistic content, but I'm not so sure. According to my maths (very dodgy caculations using Wolfram Alpha ) the online distribution is only 23.12% of what physical distribution is. Also worth considering is that the physical costs $8.95 delivered per week (only for Monday to Saturday) compared to a digital pass which costs $2.95, a difference of $6, and you get more content with the digital pass.

Of course even if you took the point of view that content is worth very little and distribution and production make up most of the costs, they are still practically giving this content away. With the price discrepancy between digital and physical distribution News Ltd have essentially priced production and delivery at $6, but this would ignore the fact that digital distribution still incurs costs, which I seriously doubt with a distribution of 31,241 they are covering, especially if they are offering ipad editions (the main appeal of the digital pass really).

My point is that even with the paywall News Ltd are practically giving their content away, and the distribution figures are nothing to brag about. If the content was priced appropriately it would be a very different story.

This isn't a tirade against Pay Walls but in fact it's quite the opposite. One of the largest media companies in the world pretty much has to give away their online content for next to nothing to get people to pay for it. Unfortunately the internet has created an expectation that content should be free by sheer saturation, in a way you could point the finger at News Ltd and other papers for contributing to this by not putting up paywalls sooner. Pay or don't pay, but I think the line should have been drawn in the sand sooner.

It could have worked, but I think old ideas are too ingrained to change it now. In essence what I am trying to say is this is too little too late.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_newspapers_in_Australia_by_circulation

http://www.bandt.com.au/news/media/the-australian-opens-up-paywall-for-first-time