One of the biggest news organizations, Reuters, has decided to unroll a new strategy for its online content.
This move is the introduction of a paywall for content and is meant to help generate funds during a time when ad revenue is shrinking.
This represents a pretty significant change for the online publisher, which has more than 41 million unique visitors per month to Reuters.com. Various sources have said that moving forward users will be able to read five stories per month at no cost but after that a subscription will cost approximately $34.99 per month.
This paywall falls in line with some of the other big competitors in the space.
The New York Times, for example, costs $18.42 per month, Bloomberg.com costs $34.99 per month and The Wall Street Journal is $38.99 per month.
Each of these three major news sites have already instituted this paywall for some time, with the Wall Street Journal doing so as far back as 1996.
Currently, the company actually gets half of its revenue from one specific client, Refinitiv, a financial data firm.
Reuters also makes a significant amount of money from online advertising. Now, it has changed its site and plans to appeal more to a “professional audience” with a larger focus on legal news as well as more live streams.
In an ideal world, Reuters is able to convince a sizable number of people to commit to a subscription and then invest some of those earnings in additional content. The cost point aligns with some of their major competitors, but it also may prove to be a turn off for many.
