Maybe the New York Times should rethink its strategy to charge readers for access to its website starting in 2011.

Newsday, put up a pay wall on its website back in October.

The result?

Only 35 subscribers have paid $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to its website newsday.com.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but in order to charge people for access, you have to  have  exclusive content that people find valuable enough to pay for.

That means editors and publishers need to do their homework and find out what parts of your site (if any) visitors are willing to pay for.

If they’re not willing to pay for it then you need to 1) get as many eyeballs to their site as possible (this means having good content) 2) sell online ads, and 3) make sure those ads are placed right creative enough that people will notice them and 4) use online conversion tools to convert as many of those visitors into leads for your customers.

If you can supply advertisers with a steady stream of leads and customers to their website, you can become very profitable.

Once newspapers figure this out, they’ll stop hemorrhaging red ink.

Tags: advertising, conversions, newspapers

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 12:00 pm by abelk and is filed under advertising, online advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.