The Times locked its website in 2010 and lost 60% of its traffic
When The Times of London put every article behind a charge in 2010, Jimmy Wales said it had made itself irrelevant. Traffic fell by 60%, and 105,000 people paid. A year later The New York Times tried a leakier approach, letting readers in for free up to a monthly limit, and signed 224,000 subscribers in three months.
Paywalls spread through newspapers from the mid-2010s as print sales and advertising shrank, partly because readers ran ad blockers. The Wall Street Journal had shown the idea could work much earlier: it built a strict wall in 1996 and still passed one million users by mid-2007. Three broad designs have emerged. Hard walls give nothing away; soft walls offer a taste such as a summary; metered walls allow a set number of free articles in a given period.
The hard version is the riskiest. One estimate holds that a site going fully paid loses about 90% of its audience and advertising, and must win it back purely through content good enough to buy. Industry opinion tends to agree the lost readership outweighs the income unless a paper serves a niche. The Guardian refused to charge at all, citing a belief in an open internet, and welcomed readers turned away by The Times.
Metering became the popular compromise. The New York Times launched it in March 2011 with 20 free articles a month, cut that to 10 in April 2012, and kept the wall porous by letting through links shared on social media. The idea is to keep light readers visiting while charging the heavy ones. Critics such as Anne Nelson argued the paper's 2011 profit owed more to cutbacks and asset sales. The Boston Globe split itself in two in September 2011, a paid site for its journalism and a free one for community and lifestyle news, then switched to a meter of 10 articles per 30 days in 2014 after reaching over 60,000 digital subscribers.
Opinions have shifted over time. Arianna Huffington declared the paywall history in 2009, while Warren Buffett and Rupert Murdoch saw promise; the media theorist Clay Shirky moved from doubter to advocate by 2012. Google once forced paywalled sites to allow some free clicks from search, a policy dropped in 2017. The newest form, cookie walls that ask users to pay or accept tracking, sits in a legal grey zone under European data protection rules.
Source: Paywall
