Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. It's very controversial, but they say you get 20 articles a month for free before you have to subscribe to us. Pretty generous. The top news section on the smartphone and tablet apps will always be free. But people are skeptical. In the first year, it goes like, okay. They get 400,000 paid digital subscribers in the first year. By year 2, they're up to about 660,000. Year 3, they only had 100,000, they get to 760,000. Year 4, they're at 900,000. It's going okay. I think in year 3, they chopped their free articles in half from 20 to 10 that you would get. They're starting to realize, oh, we got to pull some leverage here to make more people subscribe. More alarmingly, though, as they're implementing this metered paywall, people are going elsewhere for news. The traffic to the site drops by over half during this time.…

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