Press+ study: Digital subscription charges up 40 per cent

Press+, which helps digital publishers to implement subscription models, has announced that subscription costs are rising and 'meters' – the number of articles accessible for free – are falling.

From January 2012 to January 2013 the average price of a monthly digital subscription increased by nearly 40 per cent while the average meter setting dropped by ten percent, a move to prices that the company says "reflect the true value of their content".

"It was only a couple of years ago when it was rare for a publisher to charge online," Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of Press+, told Journalism.co.uk. "In North America it rapidly became the exception for a publisher to be free online.

"Based on interest we're now seeing from the UK, 2013 will be the year when most British publishers will likewise have paid digital models and will generate significant new revenues in the process."

Press+ monitor and measure large amounts of data on the paid model through their affiliated publishers that can then be used to advise them individually on how best to go forward.

Some of the bigger publishers that use Press+ include titles such as the Independent, the National Post of Canada, the Baltimore Sun, a number of magazine and business-to-business publishers as well as online-only publishers.

"Digital subscriptions have become the top source of news revenues for hundreds of publishers around the world," continued Crovitz, "and [it] is enabling them to restore the journalism that was threatened when publishers were overly dependent on advertising.

"As more and more news operations generate revenues from digital subscriptions there will be more jobs for journalists and an end to the waves of layoffs the industry has experienced for the past several years."

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