Bloomberg considers high paywall for online news feeds, announces expansive changes to BusinessWeek

Posted by Nestor Bailly on November 5, 2009 at 1:31 PM

During an employee meeting on Tuesday at Bloomberg News, the business news giant announced that it is considering charging upwards of $1,000 yearly for some of its content on Bloomberg.com, the Wall Street Journal reports.

This would mark the most recent of Bloomberg's moves to expand its subscription options beyond Bloomberg Professional, which currently charges $1,5000 a month for in-depth and exclusive news, analyses and data.

Kevin Krim, who runs Bloomberg.com, told employees that one of the plans under consideration included selling subscription feeds on particular topics or areas for between $600 and $1000 yearly, beginning in 2010.

Bloomberg.com is currently free, making it a hard sell to start charging for their content. However, the Bloomberg Professional service currently has 300,000 subscribers at a very high price, so perhaps their clients would be willing to pay for upgraded services and content.

These plans come right after Bloomberg announced changes to the newly acquired BusinessWeek magazine.

Bloomberg execs showed confidence in the print medium when they revealed plans to expand BusinessWeek with more pages, better paper, and more international coverage.

Norman Pearlstine, Bloomberg's chief content officer and future BusinessWeek bossman, made the plans for the magazine's future public during an employee meeting on November 3rd.

In order to rival The Economist, which Pearlstine openly admires for its high subscription rate, strong circulation and advertiser appeal, BusinessWeek will increase the number of pages, use thicker and glossier paper, double the amount of stories and widen global coverage. A higher subscription price is likely to follow these changes, further modeling the most profitable news publication in the world.

There are also plans for the magazine's website, keeping most content free while in-depth analyses and 'deep' content will be available for $100 a year. This nuanced charging approach is quite a different strategy from Murdoch's plans to charge for all online content, although the date for the erection of any paywalls has been recently delayed.

The name of the magazine will also be changed to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Sources: Wall Street Journal

MediaWeek