Do newspaper website paid walls work?

This morning I did a quick run through several paid sites, picked out some headlines and journalists' names and searched for them on Technorati.  I chose Technorati as a search engine because it's an engine which searches blogs whose authors tend to be the ones that read the news and comment on it, occasionally providing excerpts or even entire texts of articles.

This was anything but a scientific investigation, but it was eye opening in two ways;

1. it showed the importance that the blogosphere places on the New York Times
   
2. it showed that if anyone wants to, they can post enough of a paid-wall article on the web for anyone to see that it doesn't much matter if you have a subscription or not.
   

On the first point, I ran some random headlines from today's The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and South China Morning Post, all paid subscription sites, and came up with very little. To be sure, I Googled them too. Nothing. 

Similar Technorati searches for the New York Times op-ed columnists behind the paid wall came up with plenty of blog articles, some posted a mere two minutes beforehand.

I went a little further and searched for a few of The Times sports, business, New York Region and International Herald Tribune reporters and a decent amount of blogs had mentioned them as well.

Although most of these blogs did not print the whole article, several linked to a site which had posted the articles, some cursing TimesSelect in the meantime calling it a "lame pay system" and "TimesDelete."

This leads me to my second point.  Most of these blogs contained lengthy excerpts, several key quotes or so much detailed description of what the Times' columnists wrote that it rendered reading the Times' column pointless. In the same way, it is probable that there are circles of bloggers who find ways to get around the paid walls of the three other newspapers consulted and share their favorite columnists with those who read them (if any of our readers have some knowledge of this it please share it with us jburke@wan.asso.fr).

Sharing articles in such a way can be considered a similarity, however exaggerated, to the difference between circulation and readership of a newspaper; circulation being paid-for copies and readership being those to whom those copies are passed on. There are several ways to do this over the Internet beginning with a simple copy/paste of an article and an email. And although online this may technically be illegal through copyright clauses, violators of paid wall privileges will be very hard to track and prosecute in the same way that the music industry is having trouble fighting their file sharing problem (read Mignon Media's Eliot Bergson about how i-Pods for newspapers won't work.)

On the other hand, we do know that the Wall Street Journal has been fantastically successful with its online paid model. But the Journal publishes content specific news that people are willing to pay for because it could benefit their own financial situation.  The New York Times' op-ed columnists, the main subject of TimesSelect criticism, may benefit those with an interest in politics but their publishing-capable opinion colleagues are now in the millions in the blogosphere. Apart from their own qualms with the state of the world, if they need the Times, or any other paid article, there's a good chance that they'll find it.

ps. The New York Times' Company reports that reception of TimesSelect "has been very good, well ahead of expectation." The company is not releasing statistics at this time.

Source: Morningstar, Mignon Media