On Paywalls and Newspapers

Newsday got bought out by the Dolan family, the folks who own Cable Vision, and they promptly put the website behind a subscription wall.

Do you know how many people are willing to buy a $5 a week subscription to the Long Island newspaper?

Well, after 3 months, they have 35 subscribers, so I think that their newsroom outnumbers the web page subscribers.

I think that the folks at the New York Times are in for a world of hurt.

Their pay wall is a bit different, you get a few stories before having to pay, but what it will mean to folks like me is that I won't link to them unless they have a big exclusive. It's just not worth it to me.

As it currently stands, I do link to them frequently as a paper of record.

Now, I'm sure that the loss of the eyeballs of my reader(s) does not mean much in the scheme of things, but when their OP/EDs were behind a pay wall, they completely fell off the screen on the internet.