Folha Has More Readers and Subscriptions after a Year of Paywall

06/24/2013 - 09h52

The porous paywall system of Folha 's website turns one year old today.
In that period, the number of visitors to the site increased 4%, the number of pages visited grew 15% and the number of full digital subscriptions rose 189%.
Survey shows consumers are more willing to pay for digital content.

Folha was the first Brazilian newspaper to adopt this system. Since then, more and more newspapers have adopted the porous paywall system as a way to finance high-quality journalism without blocking occasional readers.

"Our experience with the paywall shows that it is an interesting and sustainable model," says Folha 's managing director, Antonio Manuel Teixeira Mendes. Sérgio Dávila, Folha's executive director says "internet users are more willing to pay for access to reliable and good-quality information."

Other Brazilian newspapers that adopted the system include "Zero Hora", of Rio Grande do Sul and "Gazeta do Povo", from Paraná. Others such as "O Estado de S. Paulo" and "O Globo" started to require readers to register to continue reading after a certain number of articles.

The main case of this system abroad is the U.S.'s "The New York Times", which started using it in 2011.
Survey institute Pew says by the end of 2012, one third of the U.S.'s newspapers had adopted a kind of paywall system.

In the model chosen by Folha, internet users can read up to 20 articles a month free of charge - after the tenth article, they are required to make a simple registration. Some parts of the site, such as the Homepage, are not counted.

After the paywall system was adopted, Folha increased the content offer on its webpage. Texts that were only featured in the printed newspaper became available online, which contributed to the increase in readers.

The digital subscription allows access to Folha 's entire content not only on the website, but also on tablets and mobile phones, for which Folha has an HTML5 app, adaptable to different models.

Translated by THOMAS MUELLO

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