In March, The New York Times set up a "paywall" for their website and it seems that 224,000 readers are currently paying to read the news online by the end of this second quarter. There are also 57,000 people who pay for the e-reader edition. An additional 100,000 subscribers received a free subscription through a Ford Motor promotion and there are 756,000 subscribers of the printed newspaper who also have access to the site through a digital account. This means there are more than 1 million digital users of the New York Times.

New York Times did not built a fully closed paywall. Readers without a subscription can read up to 20 articles per month on the homepage. When this limit is exceeded, the reader can access the items through other links via, for instance, Facebook. Referrals derived from Google have a limit of 5 articles per day.

Nowadays, we see that more and more newspapers are struggling to generate revenues from online advertising and therefore choose the paywall as a business model. For many online newspapers, free online news is not sustainable, not even with the sale of advertisements. Moreover, you could say that paying for articles with a certain news value is worth it, as copyrights need to be respected, just like paying for music online.

Read more about newspapers that use a paywall on Future of Copyright:

• Dutch newspaper Nederlands Dagblad follows the trend and launches paywall

• Major Dutch newspaper sets up paywall for their website

• Major French newspaper sets up paywall

• New York Times behind a paywall: what are the consequences?

Reference: Emerce.nl