Newsday Pay-to-read Website failing miserably

Three months after the Dolans decided to put the online version of Newsday behind a premium subscriber wall news is that it is failing miserably. Truth is I am giddy over this. I absolutely hate the Dolans. I also have a lot of discontent with Newsday. I grew up on the paper as a kid and remember fondly walking to the mailbox to get the paper every day and reading it. But over recent years they have raised their costs time and time gain all the while losing content by the bucket load. Seems like every 6 months the cost of the paper raises but we get absolutely nothing in return, in fact most of the actual “content” is now gone and they just regurgitate what the AP reports on or what other websites cover. There is very little actual content generated by the paper itself. Newsday in my eyes is truly a case study in how NOT to survive these days as a newspaper. Wait until you read some of these quotes:

So, three months later, how many people have signed up to pay $5 a week, or $260 a year, to get unfettered access to newsday.com?

The answer: 35 people. As in fewer than three dozen. As in a decent-sized elementary-school class.

Wow. Now yes I do understand that anyone with a Cablevision Optimum account or has a subscription to Newsday itself gets access (including myself) but lets step back and consider this for a second. Newsday reportedly dumped $4 million dollars into the transition, and according to those 35 subscriptions it will take them about 450 years to recoup those costs. Now you will say it’s not all just about subscription costs, your right, and how do you think their overall traffic faired after being blocked behind the pay wall? Well it plummeted according to reports. And that means one thing, their advertising revenue will also plummet.

But wait there is more:

Mr. Jimenez was in no mood to apologize. “That’s 35 more than I would have thought it would have been,” said Mr. Jimenez to the assembled staff, according to five interviews with Newsday staffers.

He argued that the web was not intended to be a revenue generator, but rather to provide extra benefit to loyal subscribers.

Un-be-lievable! Wow just wow. How do these people get jobs. So you planned for nobody to subscribe? It was planned to be BONUS? Giving someone something that they already had cannot be considered a bonus. And if you never planned to make any revenue on the subscriber base, then why not make it freaking free to potentially expand your readership and increase advertising revenues? Instead you basically are committing suicide. Amazing.

I’ll be honest, if Newsday doesn’t file for bankruptcy in this year I will be amazed. The big problem is since the Dolans have taken over it has been a circus with Newsday. And it doesn’t take a psychic to see the writing on the wall. How hard do you think it is to get talent at Newsday now? It’s hard enough industry wide but imagine trying to hire or retain quality journalists when your newspaper is a national joke (much like the Knicks I might add, another Dolan family play-toy). Staff are leaving. Content is getting worse. Readers are certainly noticing. And all the while to cover this huge deficit they just keep increasing the price, and making moves like shutting off the website. What they should have been doing is pushing the website hard and for free trying to increase readership, and adding more local news in the print version to actually entice my to buy it.

Explain to me why, as a local Long Island resident I would pay $1.50 for a pathetically small newspaper when I can just go on my laptop and read their website for free? Absolutely makes no sense. They are stealing their own readership!