Sacramento Bee is charging for anyone that wants to view more than 15 pages in a 30 day period. This change was made on September 5th. Sacramento Bee said in part “Newspaper websites around the country have begun charging readers for access to news during the last couple of years. At Sacbee.com, print subscribers will continue to have free digital access until their current subscription renews. Regular digital readers who do not already subscribe will be asked to do so.”
Online-only access will be $6.95 per month or $69.95 a year; print subscribers can add access to sacbee.com for $1.99 a month or $19.95 a year.
The McClatchy-owned newspaper has been on the decline for years. Most of the nation’s newspaper did not evolve quickly enough when their readers went online for their news. Paywalls are becoming much more common for online newspapers. McClatchy once traded for over $74 per share now tradess fro less than $3 per share so something needs to be done.
So are people willing to pay $6.95 per month for access to Sacbee.com? According to Quantcast.com SacBee.com has lost about 100K visitors in the last month. We will need to monitor their traffic in the long term though because one month is too short of a time-frame to monitor web traffic. Also any tech savy person can get around the paywall.
