Postmedia chain moving to ‘metered model’

Postmedia Network Canada Corp. plans to implement a “metered model” to charge frequent readers for premium content on the websites of all of its newspapers, the country’s largest newspaper publisher said last Friday. The decision comes five months after the company began a trial program to charge online readers for premium content on the websites of two of its most popular papers, the Montreal Gazette and the Victoria Times Colonist. Readers of those papers were permitted 20 premium articles per month before incurring additional charges for premium articles, columns, features, photo galleries and videos. Postmedia announced in October that it has reached a deal to sell the Times Colonist to Vancouver company Glacier Media Inc. for $86.5 million. Postmedia will join an increasingly long list of other newspaper publishers who have erected paywalls on premium content in the hopes of recouping lost revenues from traditional advertising and print classified sections, including The New York Times and the Boston Globe. Postmedia reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.3 million Friday. That number was punctuated by a 4.6 per cent drop in revenues, including a five per cent drop in print advertising, and a 2.5 per cent decline in print circulation, which fell to $145.6 million and $58 million, respectively. “A decade ago we started to give it away on the Web ... everybody in the newspaper business is looking in the rearview mirror and saying, what the heck did we do?” Postmedia’s CEO Paul Godfrey told The Globe and Mail last week. “Newspapers are going to need this going forward … It’s only a matter of time.”

Postmedia chain moving to ‘metered model’

Brief | November 1, 2011

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