More than 500 newspapers, magazines and news sites from around the world will start testing payment models for their online content starting in autumn.
The American company «Journalism Online», responsible for the project, announced that it has reached an agreement with 176 daily newspapers, 330 non-daily publications and some news websites, audience leaders worldwide, to whom it will provide technology that will give publishers solutions flexible charging methods.
Payment methods can go through a subscription system or charging for access to an article individually considered, among others, in a total of 16 modalities that start to be tried in the last quarter of this year.
Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery, the three administrators in the media area, who launched the project in April, believe that this is a way to cope with the decrease in advertising revenues and to monetize online publications.
According to the founders of Jornalism Online, the media with which they signed an agreement represents an audience of 90 million users per month and more than 10 percent of these publications will be able to generate annual revenues between 30 and 70 euros per subscriber .
The losses of visitors associated with the collection of content will be only residual, they believe.
It is estimated that a site with around 1 million monthly visitors will be able to generate revenues between 3.5 and 7 million euros, if it starts charging for access to the news.
However, they remain to reveal which means make up the list of future customers of Jornalism Online.
The company only says that there are 506 members, and does not advance any more data.
News Corp owner Robert Murdoch was the first to announce that he would abolish free content in his online publications, starting next summer.
The statements came last week and were aimed at investors: the company will start charging for the content «on all of our news sites,» said Murdoch, quoted by the Los Angeles Times.
But it is not known whether it will use the services of Jornalism Online.
Also according to information from the Los Angeles Times, some publishers have already stated that they had not committed themselves to the new platform for charging online content, such as McClatchy Co, the third largest in the United States, which has 30 daily newspapers or publisher of the Los Angeles Times, which also publishes the Chicago Tribune.
