Irish News builds on paywall revenue by selling the design

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Regional newspaper the Irish News has turned its own paywall into an extra business opportunity, by selling the technology package behind it to other news publishers.

The independently-owned Belfast-based paper used to have a part-paid, part-free website, but replaced this model with subscription-only access to a digital edition of the paper. Readers can pay £5 for access to a week's editions, £15 for a month or £150 for a year's 312 editions of the e-edition.

"When the paper was available for free, apart from the cost of running the website, we were losing readers of the paid for paper to the free online model, which was economic madness. Now readers have a clear and equitable choice, pay for a printed newspaper or pay for the same paper online," Liam McMullen, systems and resource manager, told Journalism.co.uk.

Having developed the technology behind the page-turning service in house, the Irish News is now offering this subscription and digital edition service as product packages to other publishers and has signed up weekly regional newspapers as clients. Costs for the service start from £465 and cover server resources, bandwidth and video streaming as part of the digital editions.

Other newspapers, such as the Times and Sunday Times, are planning paywalls around websites offering a mix of print material and online-only content ; other groups are charging for digital editions like the News, including Tindle Newspapers, which is claiming success with this model .

According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), the Irish News' total average net circulation per issue between 29 June 2009 and 3 January 2010 was 45,667. Since its launch in December 2009 the News' online site has had 1,215 paid subscriptions to date: 320 yearly, 370 monthly, 525 weekly subscriptions.

But selling on the technology that the News developed for its own website is an opportunity for the title to maximise revenue from existing online resources and derive more benefit from online, said McMullen.

The paper did look at using a third-party digital edition technology for its own site, but was unhappy what was on offer. Creating their own version has allowed the group greater control over the product and the ability to offer more personal customer service to readers, added McMullen.

On the old News site a third-party provider had been used for the subscription payments, but the title wanted to create its own system to simplify this process for users, who might be put off by a complex subscription system, he said.

The service has been well received and there are no plans to take down the subscription wall on the Irish News site and re-introduce free content, he said.

"People were used to getting our news for free, but we just had to explain that everybody would pay the same amount for the new subscriptions and explain the costs involved with us running the site," said McMullen.

On the old site the revenues from advertising covered the costs of running those adverts but little else and McMullen said the title wants to find better ways of serving its advertisers online. The News is looking at how the geolocation capabilities of mobile phones, smartphones and devices such as the iPad could be used to serve more targeted advertising around the paper's news, he said.