GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - 20% of online newspapers now have paywalls

Quote:

More than one-fifth of U.S. newspapers now require a paying subscription for full digital access, twice the number that did a year ago.

That?s according to News&Tech, whose growing list of newspapers with metered paywalls or some other form of digital subscription plan has surpassed 290. There are 1,387 daily newspapers in the U.S. as of 2009, says a Pew study published earlier this year.

Moves at the Gannett Co. have been largely driving the increase. The company announced in February that it would be bringing paid models to the websites of all 80 of its newspapers by the end of the year, excluding USA Today. McClatchy, the third largest newspaper owner in the U.S., said in its second-quarter earnings report in July that it planned to roll out a metered paywall in five markets this fall.

The most recent papers to institute metered plans are The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, The Leader-Telegram in Eau Claire., Wis., The Indianapolis Star and The Columbis Dispatch in Ohio, according to News&Tech. New York, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina are the states most heavily affected by online paywalls.

Many, including the publishers of The Chicago Tribune, which will install its own digital paywall later this year, have pointed to the success of The New York Times?s metered access model in support of their own. The Times has more than half a million digital subscribers as of the end of June. The paywall?s growth helped drive an 8% increase in circulation revenues in the paper?s last quarter. The paywall has also partially set off print declines because many customers have purchased print-and-digital packaged subscriptions, a spokesperson pointed out.

http://mashable.com/2012/08/28/us-newspapers-paywalls/

Why don't they just keep giving it all away? Or why don't they find a way to use the DMCA in order to get their competitors to incur all the costs of generating the content while they get to keep the profits? These people must be real idiots.