National part-paywall for Poland to start charging readers

From midnight tonight readers of 42 newspaper and magazine websites in Poland will be asked to pay for premium content. Listeners to Polish National Radio will be required to pay if they want to access higher-quality audio.

In July Piano Media, the company that launched national part-paywalls in Slovakia and Slovenia, announced that a group of publishers in Poland were to adopt a joint paid-for subscription model.

According to Piano Media, its payment system is not the first to be implemented in Poland, but it is by far the biggest with seven Polish media providing content from 42 websites, including three national daily and 20 regional newspapers, 15 different magazines and a national radio station.

Readers were asked to pre-register from the time the national part-paywall was announced in July. "We expect the system to be a success, far more so than any other payment system currently in operation in Poland," Piano Media said in an email to Journalism.co.uk.

"Pre-registrations were surprisingly good,” said Piano’s chief executive Tomáš Bella in the release. "When our partners started to lock content on their websites, implemented our key payment icon and pushed premium content to their users, pre-registrations really picked up. If we do as well in Poland as we did in Slovakia and Slovenia, then we can expect our results to be right on target.”

From midnight, users wishing to access premium content on participating sites will select from one of three subscription plans: €2.37 per week, €4.70 per month, or €47 for one year.

Participating publishers include Poland's leading daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Polish National Radio; the national daily Super-Express; lifestyle magazine Murator Dom; and the monthly business magazine Forbes.