Media Pay Walls Annoy Canadian Consumers

Starting June 1, Times Colonist readers will be able to view up to 20 articles per month, and after that must pay a fee.
Media Pay Walls Annoy Canadian Consumers
The Times Colonist office in Victoria. Readers of the Times Colonist and the Montreal Gazette will have limited access to online content as the papers' websites become metered. (Joan Delaney/The Epoch Times)
5/30/2011
Updated:
10/1/2015

<a><img src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/09/DSCN1879.jpg" alt="The Times Colonist office in Victoria. Readers of the Times Colonist and the Montreal Gazette will have limited access to online content as the papers' websites become metered. (Joan Delaney/The Epoch Times)" title="The Times Colonist office in Victoria. Readers of the Times Colonist and the Montreal Gazette will have limited access to online content as the papers' websites become metered. (Joan Delaney/The Epoch Times)" width="320" class="size-medium wp-image-1803390"/></a>
The Times Colonist office in Victoria. Readers of the Times Colonist and the Montreal Gazette will have limited access to online content as the papers' websites become metered. (Joan Delaney/The Epoch Times)
The plan of two Canadian newspapers to launch experimental pay walls is meeting with dissatisfaction from many readers.

Starting June 1, readers of the Victoria Times Colonist will be able to view up to 20 articles per month, and after that they must pay a monthly subscriptions fee of $9.95 for nonsubscribers; subscribers to the print edition must pay $2.95 for full online access.

The Montreal Gazette will charge $6.95 per month for full online access, while subscribers to the print edition have unlimited access for free.

Times Colonist publisher Bob Mackenzie wrote to readers in an announcement that after carefully considering the pay wall model, “we have decided this is an important step to continue to invest in providing authoritative, local coverage to our readers.”

By May 29 the announcement had drawn 147 comments on the Times Colonist website—99 percent of them opposed to the idea.

“I won’t be paying, that’s for sure,” posted an anonymous online reader on May 26. “I'll be going to CBC or other online news. ... Lots of other ways to get the news from my home town. Bye T.C. You guys just shot yourselves in the foot.”

This reaction is not surprising considering a recent University of British Columbia study that found 81 percent of Canadians polled said they would not pay for news online, and 90 percent indicated they would find free alternatives if their preferred news websites started charging for content.

Mary McGuire, a professor of journalism at Carleton University, said that if newspapers want to introduce pay walls, they must have content that can’t be found elsewhere, otherwise readers will seek out free alternatives.

“They’re just not going to pay for something that they have always perceived as freely available in many places online,” she said in an interview.

McGuire said it hasn’t been easy for print newspapers to find a successful model online, but a solution must be found to ensure quality journalism is supported.

First introduced by major publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the pay wall model and pay metering have shown limited success around the world with most online charging systems going through various incarnations before being dropped.

Ambarish Chandra, assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, says readers eventually accepted paying for the New York Times when they realized the quality would suffer if they didn’t.

“They are starting to see that there is a choice between paying a little or seeing their favorite newspaper become even more watered down,” he said.

Chandra says adopting pay walls is a feasible business plan for newspapers, and will likely become more accepted as readers realize quality journalism requires quality compensation.