While some are hoping erecting paywalls will be the answer to newspapers' woes, others are still banking on an advertisement-based revenue model to pay off.

Both Paid Content and Guardian report that DMGT executives met with shareholders yesterday and courted "advertisers and eyeballs to remain largely free," writes Robert Andrews for Paid Content. This information comes from the Investor day slides DMGT has put online, which seem aimed at undermining the Times Online's paid online content strategy unveiled less than a month ago.

Martin Clarke, publisher of the Mail Online, focuses on the reason why, as opposed to Wapping newspapers, Mail Online will remain free. Clarke says that whether one likes it or not, "the web is free with one or two players in each sector becoming big winners."
Mail Online is now big enough to make the advertising model pay and that is a feature that sets it apart from other UK newspaper sites, according to Clarke. The site, as he shows, has grown at an impressive rate of 130% annually in readership. In January, the Mail Online surpassed Guardian.co.uk in average visitors per day and in February, it was the leading news site in unique visitors.

According to Clarke, keeping the Mail Online free has the advantage of allowing the newspaper to expand its brand internationally and protecting and promoting the group's paid-for products and services. While a paywall might make little money, Clarke concludes, "we will make a lot."

Clarke offers little indication of what it means to be "big enough" to make the advertising model pay. He says that the site's "critical mass" gives the Daily Mail the opportunity to forge lucrative new partnerships with select clients. While big news sites can make advertising money from the large traffic they garner, it is unlikely, that with an advertising downturn, a solely advertising-based model can work.

Although newspapers like Guardian have ruled out erecting universal paywalls around their websites, enthusiasm around the idea of paywalls has grown with even newspapers with a large number of readers, like the New York Times, starting to charge for access to their websites.

For NewsCorp CEO Rupert Murdoch, the paywall's fiercest advocate, paid online content prices are reasonable and that when readers have nowhere to go "they will start paying," as he said at the National Press Club two weeks ago. But, if readers can go somewhere else to read the news and they can do so for free, they will most definitely not pay.

Sources: DMGT, Guardian, Journalism.co.uk, Paid Content,