Why paywalls don't work - Archant chief

One of Archant's senior executives, Stephan Phillips , attending the WAN-IFRA conference this week, was asked whether the Norfolk-based company would consider putting up a paywall. His reply: We tried to charge for access to content for the business section of our website about 10 years ago, and it was a complete disaster. As long as we have competition from the BBC , with the publicly-funded nature of this service and its known ambitions to expand in local markets, it will be impossible for us to have a viable charging mechanism. I'm not certain that blaming the BBC alone is reasonable. Anyway, Phillips continued: For regional newspapers in the UK, the best way forward is to publish good websites and to cleverly combine all advertising possibilities from display to sponsorship; to social networks engaging with local communities around themes (our football fan social networks has 160,000 unique visitors a month); or electronic coupons; video with ads; and we have also started using QR codes to link our print products to mobile sites. So there is a whole range of things you can do rather than charging people to get content. Source: Editors' weblog