The West Australian used to have a relatively decent website (for the time), with probably about 70% of their articles available for free. I wasn't a daily visitor, but certainly checked in once or twice a week.

Then 18 months or so ago some brightspark decided that they could put it all behind a paywall. Fair enough except they went and made it more expensive than buying the paper down at the shop!?! And the online version is just a replication of the paper, including layout and ads, so there's not even any added value.

Obviously I stopped going to the site, and only check it every 6 months or so to see if they've come to their senses. I'd be really interested to see if they've actually ever made any money off it.

I think that for highly specialised content like the AFR, which has no real compelling alternatives, the subscription model is a sound one. The service AFR provides looks to be fairly comprehensive, and I can definitely see financial industry types shelling out for it.

As for the rest of the Fairfax stable, I doubt it would be as successful. For general news, smh.com.au is my source of choice, but if a subscription model was introduced i'd have no qualms about jumping ship to news.com.au or the like.

Subscription content is only successful if you offer something that’s not available elsewhere or you make it cheaper than buying on the street.

The Times UK Online E-paper is quite good because you get the whole paper including the supplements and if you pay monthly the cost is less than buying on the street.

The Age and the SMH have gone down a very workable path in my view, though they should have kept both bleeding edge and webdiary since blogging is becoming even more important than op eds in attracting and holding readers.

News Ltds' approach, based on Murdoch's cheapskate "if I can't get an immediate return what's the point" philosophy, has been a disaster, the sites are crap in design and weak in content. A chance to build early a habit of visiting has been lost.

Agree the Fin Review is the only paper that could go the Wall St Jrnl route and even then could be difficult with a much smaller potential audience. The big attraction Fin has is being a valuable knowledge resource as a financial paper of record and this means full archive access is the best product it has.

In the case of non Fin review papers, and may even apply to Fin review, I suspect it's just going to be about readership and advertising. More and more ad money is going on-line and the established press has a headstart here. As e-reading of papers takes off, and it is in a small way via pdas already, advertising will garner more reach and be more valuable. Print has a really good chance to trump TV and radio here, especially with short video and audio grabs as well. In the end websites may become as important a revenue source as the paper proper (classifieds aside as separate issue since they have already substantially migrated to the web.)

Good free content is also important in steering people from the editorial sites to the classified sites. Thus the last thing an Age or SMH should be doing is not giving incentives to people to visit their news site, since it is just a click away from Drive and Domain. (NB the Domain site needs improvements because currently realestate.com is killing it).

So I overall I think Age and SMH have something close to the right model. Fin Review is different but I would be tempted, given small circulation, to provide daily issues free and charge for archive access. This should improve revenue streams from both increased print and web circulation archive charges.

Incidentally the Fairfax press removed itself from the Lexis Nexis news database used by many institutions last year. It moved to Factiva, which I believe is also a Fairfax company. Factiva charges far more for much less. Presumably this was profitable but they may have shot themselves in the foot, since many insitutions won't pay for an extra service and consequently are just staying with Lexis. Fairfax papers are therefore dropping in publication of record status.

Agree with your comments CW, particularly the last part. The Age/SMH have got it spot on IMO with their website content - at least 75% is free, with the paid stuff being extra (not available in print) or archived material.

FYI - Factiva is a Dow Jones and Reuters joint venture. We have more than 10,000 sources from round the world and add more than six million articles each month. There is no Fairfax ownership.