Another News Corp newspaper will have its website moved behind a paywall from tomorrow. Starting from Thursday 1st August The Sun website will no longer be free to browse willy-nilly without a subscription or a daily access code.
News Corp, which has previously paywalled The Times and The Sunday Times in the UK (in 2010), has a new plan with The Sun - it will print two million daily access codes in the printed edition of the newspaper so buyers can also browse the website. For the first month that will be the Sun+ premium website including mobile apps, vouchers and videos of soccer goals, not just the ordinary website. After the first introductory month access to the Sun+ content will only be available to folk who have collected 20 codes within the previous month.
Today's Sun headlines
Wired wasn't sure whether the printed access codes in the daily will be able to be saved for other days or they will be valid for that day only and has asked News Corp for clarification. Readers of The Sun will find out in the small print of their newspaper access code vouchers tomorrow. Incidentally News Corp has had to equip new printing presses to facilitate the inclusion of the access codes within its pages.
Another way to access the paywalled Sun newspaper website will be to pay £2 a week. Also today there is a special offer where you can pre-register for just £1 for two months access including Sun+ content. For this small fee the site promises you "a whole new world of digital entertainment will be at your fingertips".
It will be interesting to see how this affects the 1.8 million daily visitors to The Sun website, if we could ever find out actual figures for that. It's really hard to find revealing figures about how The Times has been performing since the paywall was put up around its website. However the widely reported 'loss of reach' of The Times has been compensated by increased revenue according to a recent report.
At the time of writing the top comment on the Sun's page about the new paywall was "Goodbye Sun and hello Daily Mail." Could the Mail go behind some kind of wall too?
