Freemium paywall drives subs at Swiss daily Blick | Regional media collapse in numbers

And could AI bring publishers more control rather than less?

Feb 15, 2024

Welcome to this week’s Future of Media newsletter from Press Gazette on Thursday 15 February 2024.

Grüezi!

Today we take you on a journey to Switzerland where daily title Blick helped inspire Mail Online’s new premium content paywall model.

Head of reader revenue at Blick Group Adrian Gottwald explains how the title phased in registrations and then subscriptions by gating certain articles. With more than 16,000 paying subscribers signed up in the first eight months it appears to be a winning strategy.

We also invite you to take a trip back in time to 2007, possibly the last vintage year for UK regional press profitability.

Crunching the numbers I’ve had a stab at calculating the decline in regional press revenue and journalists since then by looking at the three biggest publishers - Newsquest, National World and Reach.

Overall, I reckon the industry is perhaps a seventh the size it once was. Depressing as this sounds, it is worth noting because it underlines the urgent need to create a level playing field for publishers with the tech giants (who now have all the money).

Some sort of reckoning is coming this year in the form of the Digital Markets Bill. So brighter news is on the horizon and I am told the hope is a deal will be done before the general election that it would lead to an Australia-style injection of cash to publishers.

And we have more grounds for optimism in a think-piece from Dominic Young on AI. He runs the news industry payments platform Agate, but is also a copyright boffin as former CEO of the Copyright Hub. He thinks that the generative AI age could lead to a reassertion of the copyright in news and so build new foundations for a stronger future news industry.

New from Press Gazette

How Swiss daily Blick gained 16,000+ subscribers in eight months with a freemium paywall

Adrian Gottwald, head of reader revenue at Blick Group, told Press Gazette the registration wall, which started being rolled out around five months before the paywall, “was maybe the key element for our successful launch”.

Read more

News media versus AI: What if we win?

“The future of the media doesn’t lie in getting cheques from AI companies, or search engines, however large they might be.”

Read more

Colossal decline of UK regional media since 2007 revealed

In revenue terms the sector was about a quarter of the size in 2022 than it was in 2007, according to our analysis. When figures are adjusted for inflation the sector is around seven times smaller today than it was on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis.

Read more