Last week, Mathew Ingram from GigaOm published a very interesting article called  “If a paywall is your only strategy, then you are doomed”. He smartly describes that the way paywalls are currently mostly “stop-gap measures” and that the “revenue from the paywall won’t even make up for what is expected to be a continuing decline in print advertising”.

What is fundamentally wrong is to try to charge for something that users are not really willing to pay for online. (I’ve covered in an earlier post the good lessons to learn from NYT). The past years have proven that the most thriving companies on the web are the most innovative, not those who try to replicate an “offline” model online. Mathew argues there might be other ways to look at monetization strategies for newspapers, like for example selling ebooks, creating events, and also using the newspaper platform to “gather data and information that you can generate value from in other ways — including licensing it to developers and other third parties”.

These suggestions are actually very interesting, and bring an interesting correlation with what i’ve experienced in the music industry. Check this out. (more…)