August 14, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
Offering a service for online news publishers to charge their consumers for online content is the business model of Journalism Online LLC. This week they reported that they signed affiliate agreements with over 500 online magazine and news sites with a combined audience of about 90 million monthly visitors. For a company whose website is devoid of much content, it is ironic that their mission is to take what has been free content and allow web publishers to network sites together and charge for the content. The news about this site and the attempted shift to ask users to pay for content comes shortly after News Corp. Chief Executive, Rupert Murdoch, announced plans that they will start to charge for content across their group of web properties.
Newspaper companies have been struggling to maintain profitability with the dramatic increase in people using the Internet as their primary and often only news source of information. Local news company, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, recently shut down print operations and shifted to a strictly online business model, leaving Seattle a one newspaper town. Journalism Online looks to be getting into the market at the perfect time, but the ultimate question is whether or not people will pay for their news online. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all content on all sites will require payment as the company plans to offer options like per-article payment methods. There will also be an “all you can read” type of model that publishers can use, but that means they are potentially putting up a barrier to users who can possibly get their news on other websites.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
