The New York Times has given an update on its paywall and overall digital subscription numbers with the number of digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of paper, and the International Herald Tribune, hitting 390,000 at the end of the fourth quarter. That’s up 20%, or by almost 70,000, since the end of the third quarter of 2011.

Including the Boston Globe the New York Times had a total of 406,000 paid digital subscriptions. Read More »

Yesterday, I blogged on how The New York Times paywall was working as its digital subscriber numbers grow.

Today the Financial Times has issued an update on how its paywall is going from strength to strength and has broken through a significant barrier. Read More »

The New York Times put out a press release yesterday, the big headline of which was that it has recorded a slight rise in the print circulation of the paper’s Sunday edition, but the real story was that its total digital subscriptions are on the up. Read More »

I wrote earlier this year that News International was rethinking its anti-social media paywall policy with regards whether it would introduce a paywall for the Sun modelled on the one employed by The Times.

It had intially been reported that The Sun would follow in the footsteps of the News of the World, which saw its traffic plummet after its paywall went live, but that turned out to be the least of its problems. Read More »

Brands should be careful not to fall off the balcony of cool – broadening the debate surrounding memes and whether brands should engage with consumers whilst being on-trend.

This is an ambitious blog post. I am aim to identify some things brands and marketers should be aware of when placing a brand at the very apex of cool, I aim to tell you a little bit about memes and I aim to inform you of why my theory of the balcony of being on-trend should be constantly at the forefront of all of our minds(!). Read More »

Other than the aggregation engine that is the Huffington Post few online only sites have managed to achieve mass market success and now Slate, one of the oldest online only magazines, has swung the axe and cut some of its most high profile staff.

Coming on the day when yet another newspaper announced it was putting up a paywall, this time the Newsquest-owned Herald in Scotland, is that another nail in the coffin of free web content? Read More »

Content platforms evolve, splitting and dissipating audiences as they do. This has been happening in the UK ever since William Caxton’s printing press put the town crier out of work. Fast forward to Channel 4 competing against ITV for advertisers in 1982; the rise of 24-hour news channels; then the competition from digital TV, web; and today from mobile.

Digital technology sped up the process so fundamentally — allowing ad networks to offer ever-cheaper inventory from proliferating aggregators, leading to ‘low-rent’ click-throughs. These make the media buyer look good by driving down the cost per click. Read More »

It is the most successful computer games franchise of all time and publisher Activision Blizzard is planning to cash in on that and begin charging gamers to play with the next instalment of

Infinity Ward’s ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’.

The eagerly awaited PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 Modern Warfare 3 is due in November and with the £40 plus price tag will likely come a subscription of around £5 a month as publishers of all kinds look to making their content pay. Read More »

Music streaming service Spotify is cutting by half the amount of time users can listen for free.

Spotify says its making the changes “to preserve the free service for all for the long term”.

Read More »

We’re only a little way into paywall territory at the New York Times after it went live on March 28, but Hitwise has put out some figures giving an early indication of how the paper is doing with its social media powered metered model.

Hitwise took a look at total visits to NYTimes.com for 12 days before and after paywall launch. There’s absolutely no surprise that there has been an overall decrease, but what’s interesting is this has not been as large as some might have predicted (in visits at least). Read More »