David Emery OnlineIt's Not the Pay, It's the Wall
28 March 2010
...the issue I’m interested in is whether it’s possible for a news site to exist behind a wall of any sort. Anyone who runs a relatively well-trafficked website will be able to tell you that it’s typical for the majority of traffic to be fly-by visitors from search engines and organic website referrals. A relatively smaller percentage of visitors arrive at your site by purposefully navigating directly to it (keying the URL, hitting a bookmark etc).
Drew hits the nail on the head here; there is nothing wrong with paying for content online, but putting a block between you and most of your visitors is never going to work on the web.
It’s not so much that people will actively choose to go elsewhere, more that they won’t be driven there as no-one will link to it.
Contrast that with the App store (which will soon be an Apps+Magazines+Newspaper store) where links don’t matter; what matters is popularity and familiarity. Existing print offerings have both of these in spades.
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