The state of the paywall: where do we go from here?
How to keep a readership base at a time when readers are exhausted by the information clutter and have increasingly less trust in the news? Catarina Carvallo, Executive Editor-in-Chief at Diario de Noticias, moderated the GEN Summit 2019 main stage session on the state of paywall today.
The subscription fatigue is real. Cosmin Ene, Founder and CEO of Laterpay, pointed out that while publishers need all the available tools to entice the audience, such as combination of different paying models, the fierce competition doesn’t leave much space for experiments. That was also one of the main concerns in the audience, as choices sometimes can be too much and markets — not that big for segmentation.
Steffen Danbourg, Digital Transformation Specialist and Founder of DigitalConsult pointed out that “publishers are as digital as they think they are”. As a matter of fact, he said just over 25% actually use the data. He called on publishers to create the right mix of content that actually creates conversions. Common pitfalls include “the wrong topic, the wrong publishing hours and wrong use of metrics”. He also stressed the need to become more agile, adjusting the business model and product proposition — the market is not really there, it has to be built. “There are no magic solutions, it’s all about hard work…The success that some of the Scandinavian publishers now have took more than 10 years to achieve,’’ said Danbourg.
