“Online news, video, and music providers are becoming increasingly open to charging for at least part of their content as paywall experiments by pioneers like London’s Times show that some customers will pay,” Matthew Campbell and Amy Thomson report for Bloomberg. “Music-video streaming site Vevo, Huffington Post owner AOL Inc. (AOL), and London’s Independent newspaper said this month they may introduce paid subscriptions, joining The New York Times and London’s Times in charging for online material.
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“Paywall advocates have had some success convincing Internet readers to sign up for subscriptions. New York Times Co., which began charging heavy users of its namesake paper’s website in March, has signed up more than 100,000 people for online subscriptions that start at $15 a month, it said in April,” Campbell and Thomson report. “London’s Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., had 80,000 paid online subscribers as of March.”
Campbell and Thomson report, “‘The mood is changing,’ said Charlie Beckett, the director of the Polis media research unit at the London School of Economics. ‘Murdoch and the New York Times have taken the leap, and that encourages people. It’s still a leap.'”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Brawndo Drinker” for the heads up.]