Every time paywalls are discussed I can't help but think of history, from medieval castles to the Berlin Wall we have barricaded ourselves away from anything we consider dangerous. Now some media owners are doing the same, constructing barricades around their premium content to prevent users accessing their site for free. It is my belief that this model is doomed to failure and we must develop a better way of keeping quality content protected.
Those in favour of paywalls argue they have their advantages, especially for purely monetising content. While an online display ad only produces 10-20% of the revenue of its print counterpart, a paywall can be set at a desired value, delivering short term revenues. Supporters often cite that the paywall model is effective because it is possible to vary the degree of impenetrability depending on the type of content it is restricting, from 'soft' (think raising the drawbridge) to 'hard' (think archers and pitchers of boiling oil). It's proposed that Paywalls can help ensure a site maintains its integrity by eliminating intrusive display adverts, keep premium content premium, and even drive media owners to produce higher quality, original work.
However I believe that even these positive attributes are undermined by the major flaw with paywalls; they put people off accessing content. The Times and Sunday times are the most successful UK news sites to have a paywall but out of a readership of 7.9 million only 675,000 make it over the barrier. In fact on average only 5% of people make it over the wall to the paid-for content. Users find creating an account, entering payment information and registering a massive headache, especially on mobile where this kind of activity becomes fiddly. More often than not users will abandon the charge and seek their content for free elsewhere.
But removing paywalls doesn't eliminate the problem; quality content has to be paid for. In tough economic times, particularly for newspapers, our industry is searching for solutions to the monetisation dilemma. One idea that may hold an answer is to replace the paywall with a video ad wall. Video walls are easy to implement across desktop and mobile devices and work in a similar way to paywalls. Rather than the user paying to access content, an advertiser pays to show the user a video. The user then watches the advert to access the site for an allotted period of time (normally a week or a month) potentially increasing the number of people who reach content from 5% to 60%.
By implementing a video wall users can access their content for free without jeopardising either the future of the media owner or the quality of the finished content. If I can put my head over the parapet for a moment, I believe the paywall model is crumbling; it is time to let the barriers around premium content become more penetrable. Video ad walls protect content and ensure its survival without scaring away the very people you are trying to attract. In my opinion the new internet age will be the age of the video wall.
