Hong Kong: Two largest Chinese-language newspapers launch paid subscription sites

Posted by Katherine Thompson on October 27, 2008 at 12:27 PM

The Hong Kong Economic Journal and Hong Kong Economic Times, the two largest Chinese-language business newspapers, have launched paid websites.

The Economic Times recently revamped its online and mobile services to attract more readers. Subscribers can now view entire pages of the newspaper and subscribers - who pay HKD350 (USD45) a year - have access to real-time market news and analysis, newspaper content, archives for the past three years, amongst other things.

The Economic Journal has attracted more than 8,000 registered subscribers since it launched in July. 7,000 joined in the early-bird registration campaign, paying HKD398 for a year's online access. The special early subscripton offer was closed last week and the prixce for subscription now HKD598. As an added inticement, the wall-respected Mr Cho column was also made available and a year of his archived articles. Subscribers need to pay HKD248 a year for access to Mr Cho's archive.

"We are going to launch several columnists' archives in the future to make it easier for our readers to navigate and find the information they need," a source told Media Eye last week.
The source said the Journal 's portal still attracted new subscribers even though the subscription rate increased last week.

"I think our subscriber base is quite good, compared with other newspaper websites on a paying model, like SCMP.com, which has more than 10,000 subscribers. We believe content should be a premium and users should pay for that, rather than having only a free website that relies purely on advertising for revenue."

The Journal 's portal has added 30 to 40 paid subscribers a day since its launch. More than 90 per cent of the subscribers are from Hong Kong. The newspaper believes that the web edition acts as a marketing tool for the print edition.

Source: South China Morning Post via BBC Monitoring