The New York Times announced today that it’s adopting a new growth strategy that involves offering customers lower pricing to access its content.

The move comes as the company reported some pretty weak Q1 2013 earnings that saw its advertising (both digital and print) decline by 11.2 percent year-over-year. The publication saw its lowest rate of digital subscription growth (5.6 percent) since implementing a mixed freemium/paywall content business model. The publication currently has 676,000 digital subscribers, who pay $200 -$495 per year for access.

Most of the industry keeps a very close eye on the NYT’s digital subscription rate because it could present a new way for news publications to pay the bills given that it’s becoming increasingly hard to rely solely on advertising income.

As for a growth strategy, the company plans to offer its most popular content under a less expensive subscription plan and potentially let customers subscribe to specific sections at a lower price. The NYT is also planning to add a more expensive subscription plan that gives readers deeper access to the publication in both digital and print forms.

Additionally, the company said it sees an opportunity for growth in “brand extensions” — in other words, sponsored or endorsed content, products, or services.

Photo via New York Times

The New York Times will now offer unlimited free access to video content on its site and mobile apps thanks to sponsorship deals with Acura and Microsoft, the company announced today.

Back in March 2011, the Times put up a paywall for its digital content. It later raised the wall so people could view just 10 free articles or videos a month because the paywall tactic worked so well. But now video views will no longer count against the 10-article-per-month limit.

“As we continue to tell stories through video and increase our offerings, we want to ensure NYTimes.com users can watch and explore our video content with ease,” Denise Warren, NYT executive VP of digital products and services, said in a statement. “We are grateful to Acura and Microsoft for providing the support we need to continue to expand our best-in-class video content and deliver it to our vast NYTimes.com audience.”

Paywall strategies have evolved over the years. Different from the Times‘ model, blogger Andrew Sullivan has been a major proponent of offering an ad-free experience that is funded by readers. His blog The Dish charges readers $2 a month (or $20 a year) to access it. The Dish’s paywall lets nonsubscribers read just five free stories every 60 days.

The Times‘ video page offers much original content and in-depth takes on news events. Categories covered include world news, U.S., business, science, opinion, arts, style, sports, and more.

Take a look at a recent video by the Times below.

In the eternal tug of war between publishers and readers, the readers have an enormous advantage right now.

But publishers are starting to pull the rope back a tiny bit toward their side.

The AP won a legal victory against the Meltwater Group, a news aggregation service, earlier this week, with a court decision that affirmed the AP’s ownership of its stories. Newspapers like the New York Times and independent bloggers like Andrew Sullivan have started experimenting, successfully, with partial paywalls: Their sites let readers view a certain number of stories for free but demand payment for the full slate.

There’s even some backlash against the multimillion-dollar sale of Summly to Yahoo earlier this week. While most commentators focused on the the youthfulness of Summly’s 17-year-old founder and the reported $30 million price tag, Time‘s Victor Luckerson wondered how Summly — another news aggregation service — got away with what it does. Essentially, Summly was aggregating and summarizing news stories for the benefit of its users without compensating the creators of those stories. As suggested by the Associated Press v. Meltwater decision, that might not even be legal.

These court decisions and paywall strategies are just skirmishes in the bigger battle.

Just as Napster did with the music industry and The Pirate Bay did with the movie industry, aggregators like Summly and Meltwater are hollowing out the old business models of the news industry and leaving destruction in their wake. But while musicians have started to figure out new business models, news publishers and moviemakers haven’t got there, yet.

Expect more experimentation

Never before in the history of humanity have we had so much content available for free. The Internet’s default mode of publishing is to offer content — news stories, videos, music, movies, whatever — for free. To the extent that there’s a commercial transaction involved, it’s usually the rather tenuous exchange of attention for advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising is a diminishing business: Print dollars turn into dimes on the web. And web dimes turn into pennies in mobile.

Now with the increased use of tools like AdBlock and Readability, it’s possible for readers to avoid even that tiny exchange, stripping out the advertisements and leaving just the content they’re interested in reading.

Don’t get me wrong. Although VentureBeat publishes an ad-supported website, I use these tools myself occasionally. I’ll turn on AdBlock when I have a less-than-ideal Internet connection (like at a conference or during my commute) and want to optimize download times. I use Instapaper frequently to clip articles that I don’t have time to read during work hours and want to save for later.

In fact, I was an early fan of Instapaper and Readability. These tools’ capability to strip out extraneous formatting from a web page and make it more readable pointed out a serious flaw with many content sites’ designs: They were simply too cluttered.

Instead, such tools suggested another way: a combination of minimalism and user control over design, which I labeled “undesign” in a 2010 post.

The message to site designers was clear: If you want people to read your stuff, make it easy for them to do so, or else get out of the way. If readers don’t like the way your site looks, they’ll use these tools to reformat them.

Since then, other tools have popped up to fill this gap. Amazon now offers a “Kindle” button that lets readers send a story directly to their Kindles. Another popular read-later service, Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later), works similarly to Instapaper, reformatting text into a cleaner, more readable version and saving it in a queue so you can read it at your convenience. Apple’s Safari browser even has an ad-free Reader option built-in.

In short, people are doing just what I predicted. The question for publishers is how to respond?

Embrace or resist?

Pocket this week added publisher tools that let content owners see statistics on who is using Pocket. That’s helpful (and VentureBeat is considering using these tools) because it at least gives the publisher some visibility into how people are using Pocket. And by encouraging people to save articles for later, it can increase the shelf life of a good story, encouraging people to read it and share it over a longer period than they otherwise would have.

Publishers have also started experimenting with different kinds of advertising. So-called “native advertising,” or sponsored posts, are easier to integrate into the content stream and harder to filter out. Done right, a sponsored post or advertorial should be just as interesting to readers as a piece of editorial.

However, native advertising can be a dangerous game. Publishing sponsored posts without sufficiently disclosing that they’re sponsored risks blowing any trust you have with your readers, as the Atlantic discovered recently when it published a post created by the Church of Scientology. Also, Google has made it clear that Google News will punish publishers who mix sponsored content in with news content without sufficiently distinguishing the two.

Yahoo is discontinuing the Summly app, but will fold its algorithms into Yahoo itself. Should publishers embrace news summaries by Yahoo or try to find ways to thwart it, either by using tech or in the courts? There won’t be an easy answer.

As readers get more and more control over the content they want to read, publishers are in a difficult place: Run alongside them, in the ever-diminishing hope of recouping revenues at some point down the line, or risk being left behind.

Old newspapers and Reddit alien photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Blogger Andrew Sullivan has changed the pricing model for his popular blog The Dish, now offering access for $2 a month rather than only a $20-a-year option.

Sullivan moved from The Daily Beast to his own independent operation in January, and he raised more than $333,000 for the new ad-free site in just 24 hours at that time. But reader funding slowed down shortly after that and now that blog has raised $653,000 toward a goal of $900,000 by next January. Sullivan recently said new sales had essentially “flat-lined,” so the blog changed its paywall to let people read just five free stories every 60 days.

However, many readers of The Dish have been asking for Sullivan to modify his paywall to add a monthly option. Some readers may not have been willing to sign up for a $20 a year subscription but could be willing to buy into a $2 a month fee.

Sullivan writes in a blog post today:

Well, you asked for it. In fact so many asked for it, so quickly, we feel bad it took us this long to get there. But today, we can announce a new way to subscribe to the Dish, which will, we hope, accommodate those of you (a considerable number) who are going through tough economic times and could use a lower barrier to entry and the option of canceling in the future if your budget tightens again.

That’s a super-generous offer. $1.99-a-month seems a more reasonable sum – an app-like fee that simply gives you more options for payment. Like the $19.99-a-year option, we’re also leaving it up to you if you’d like to pay more – even if that’s only $2 or as much as $5. The point of course is to make this available to as many people at as many price points as you want and need, above a minimum baseline.

Andrew Sullivan photo via Flickr

Vimeo rolled out its new pay-to-view option for some of its video partners today.

The new paywall feature was first announced back in September along with Vimeo’s new Tip Jar feature, as VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig reported. While the Tip Jar feature allows fans to contribute to the creators they love, the new pay option provides a way for those creators to actually make a living, provided that enough people pay for access.

Buying access to the video automatically loads it into your watchlist, which makes it easy for you to find it on a variety mediums, including mobile phones, tablets, and smart TV apps. Video creators can set the length of time a paid video can be accessed, and the geography of where its available.

Vimeo has always distinguished itself from streaming video giant YouTube as a place that attracts long-form, premium content creators — all while declining to show advertising on its platform. That’s nice because I’ve seen some really good short films on Vimeo that probably would have been ruined with banner ads and popup notes from the creator asking me to subscribe ever 15 minutes. The new pay-to-view option should provide the video service with an important new source of revenue.

You can check out the new pay option on a handful of videos, including Shut up and Play the Hits, We Are Legion, Beauty Is Embarrassing and a few others. The paywall option should be available to all Vimeo video creators in early 2013.

Via TNW

Many content publishers looking for new revenue streams have experimented with paywalls, with mixed success.

But if you’ve got content that people are willing to pay for, paywalls and other registration gateways can work very well indeed.

“The first challenge is to build premium content … it has to be very unique,” says Gilles Domartini, chief executive and founder of Amsterdam-based Cleeng, a web service provider that helps publishers put up paywalls or registration gateways around their content. “The reason publishers today are struggling is that news is very much a commodity.”

VentureBeat worked with Cleeng early in 2012 to present a five-question registration form to readers before letting them watch a live video webinar. (Disclosure: Cleeng provided the service to us for free so that we could review it.) “By deploying the Cleeng solution, the conversion rates from the webinar were much higher than normal, and completion rates for the registration form were close to 100 percent,” VentureBeat’s director of marketing and ad operations Garrett McCullum told me.

In addition to video, Cleeng can also provide paywall-restricted access to HTML pages, PDF files, and a variety of other content — and it can do so on a wide range of platforms, including HTML5-based mobile websites.

One of Cleeng’s selling points is the simplicity of its user interface, a design aesthetic that, Domartini says, stems from his experience working for Apple. He ran the Apple Online Store in Europe from 2001-2006.

“I really saw the growth of iTunes,” Domartini said. “We saw how important it was to have a simple and straightforward user experience.”

So when he came to start Cleeng, he said, “we started from the user standpoint and thought, what do we need to do to have a technology that would work on any device, for any content, and it would ‘just work,’ from the user perspective.”

Cleeng integrates with WordPress (as a plugin). Since VentureBeat runs on WordPress.com, which restricts certain plugins, we ran into some technical speedbumps and didn’t have time to integrate the service deeply into our site, but we were able to use the service. Once installed, it makes it possible to restrict access to any page, post, or section of the site. VentureBeat used it to provide gated access to a webinar page with a live video stream.

The company is currently working with hundreds of publishers, including very large ones such as Epicurious, Lucky Magazine, and the iStrategy conference in the U.S., and  LaTribune and GoPress in Europe.

Cleeng also provides content paywall services to video publishing platforms, including Dailymotion, Brightcove, and Livestream.

Cleeng was founded in 2011 and currently has 12 employees. So far it has been funded through investments by the company’s founders.

Paywall photo: Shutterstock

Popular video-sharing service Vimeo has introduced new ways to reward the creators of videos posted on the site, with the ability to put videos behind a paywall and a new “tip jar” so people can contribute to video artists.

Vimeo has made a lot of big steps in 2012, and the site currently claims to attract 75 million monthly unique visitors. Thus far, the company brought in new CEO, redesigned its main site, launched a wide array of apps to bring in more mobile users, and integrated with Dropbox. Now Vimeo wants to give its deep community ways to make money using the service.

First up, it will immediately offer a “tip jar” on all videos so viewers can throw a little cash at the creators they love. Vimeo will pay 85 percent of the gross revenue to video creators.

The paywall situation is a little more complex. In the first quarter of 2013, Vimeo will offer a “pay-to-view” platform to Vimeo Pro subscribers that want to make money showing films and episodes. It will be a flexible platform that allows creators to set control over the price, rental duration, and other settings. The company will take a cut of each transaction, but it is still figuring out what that cut should be.

“We’ve wanted to offer this for a long time,” Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor told me. “We don’t know how big this will be, but we’re excited to see what it becomes.”

Offering a paywall for videos is a big step for IAC-owned company. It represents a way for Vimeo to attract more Pro subscribers and earn more revenue on taking a cut of a video or film rental. The company’s largest revenue generator is subscriptions, second is advertising, and third is transactions. Ideally, this could bump up how much money it gets from transactions and boost subscriptions. “We’re bullish on the growth of our subscription service,” Trainor said.

As for advertising, Trainor told me the company is looking into new ideas for ads as well. One way the company made some cash recently was by partnering with Old Spice and Wieden + Kennedy to bring a crazy interactive ad starring Terry Crews to life. It will continue to explore its options like this. Trainor said the company would have other announcements this year, so we’ll see if new ad products come into play.

Check out the video below for more on video monetization.

Photo credit: Vimeo

Brands interested in doing market research and publishers trying to make money on content have a new friend in Google, as the search giant is acting as go-between with a new tool that gives both audiences exactly what they want.

On Thursday, Google launched Google Consumer Surveys, a new product businesses can use to survey online audiences and publishers can host in place of paywalls or ads to generate revenue from site visitors.

The quid-pro-quo system works as follows: Brands, small businesses, and marketers use Google consumer surveys to conduct online market research. Google then places the questions in front of targeted web denizens when they land on a premium content page in Google’s publisher network. The brand pays per response ($0.10 to $0.50 each, depending on targeting preferences), and Google and participating publishers pocket the money made from each response. Even the would-be content viewer benefits, as she doesn’t have to pay or sign in to access news articles or videos that might otherwise be locked behind a paywall.

Here’s why this strikes us as a crafty idea: Google isn’t selling a full-service market research service, but instead a hybrid of the cheap, do-it-yourself online survey products and the expensive, hands-on approach offered by a traditional firm.

On the do-it-yourself side of things, the brand or marketer is responsible for creating the microsurvey questionnaire, determining the type of audience (U.S. only) it wants to target, and identifying the total number of responses it’s seeking. Then, the customer takes a backseat as Google drives the sampling, weighting, and analysis pieces of the process.

In so doing, Google is offering the best of both worlds — convenience, affordability, sample balancing, and analysis — and monetizing publisher content in a way that doesn’t discourage readership and traffic.

Of course, one has to wonder if Google’s controversial new privacy policies are allowing the company to pull from cross-product data to better identify folks to complete microsurveys. Google said this is not the case. The product allows for specific targeting by gender, age group, and geographic regions based on inferred demographics, and custom audience targeting through screening questions. All responses are anonymous, Google said, so they’re not tied to a user’s identity or used for future ad targeting.

At launch, publisher partners include Pandora, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Daily News. Initial brand testers include Lucky Brand Jeans, Tumbk2, and King Arthur (baking products). A Google spokesperson told VentureBeat that it’s too soon to speculate on the long-term status of the product. “Right now, our focus is on rolling this out and seeing how it can help companies and publishers meet their business objectives,” the spokesperson said.

A year ago almost to the day, Apple launched its subscription service and almost annihilated traditional journalism as we know it. It’s as if a million journalists cried out and were suddenly … well, very quiet. Apple’s model forces publishers to use one subscription-pricing model to engage with customers. It gives papers no way to bundle physical and digital goods. It severely limits the ad revenue from tablet editions of magazines and newspapers and tethers content to a device, making cross-platform content a thing of science fiction. And most importantly, Apple still controls the customer data: the lifeblood of a publisher’s business mode.

But to quote Princess Leia, “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through fingers.”

And, indeed, we’re seeing signs of a bold resistance. First, the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times ditched iTunes in favor of their own apps. Then, The New York Times showed it still had some fight left in it and launched its successful (if somewhat confusing) subscription plan. Despite the projected $25 million it cost the NYTimes to build its subscription service, MediaPost reported that paid digital subscribers to digital subscription packages, e-readers, and replica editions of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune totaled approximately 390,000 as of the end of the fourth quarter, which amounted to an increase of nearly 20% quarter-over-quarter.

Just in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen signs that the dam is breaking and the pockets of resistance are becoming a full-fledged rebellion. A second wave of publishers has joined the fight for a free, independent media in the online world. Pearson, Gannet, and The Los Angeles Times all announced their own plans for subscription services. [Full disclosure: I certainly have a vested interest in this fight as head of a company that offers subscription management services.]

This is just the beginning. The business model is there. The customers are there. Media icons like The New York Times, Pearson, and Gannet are leading the charge. As this motley crew of rebels have demonstrated, there is another way to save the fourth estate. And the time to act is now.

One year ago the iPad 2 and Apple Subscription Service launches were supposedly the death knell for publishers. We’re on the eve of the iPad 3. Publishers who stand by and watch as their content is given away for free aren’t going to survive. One year from now, many of the publishers who failed to act will be nothing but Alderaans — that is to say, dust.

Speed and efficiency is critical. It took the New York Times $25 million dollars and more than a year to build its paywall. That won’t cut it for the rest of the world.

And media companies need subscription models that are flexible, scalable, and adjustable. They can’t depend on Apple, Google, or Yahoo for this. The LA Times shouldn’t use the same model as Spin Magazine or The Alameda Sun. Newspapers and magazines need a similarly flexible platform to create the right bundles for the right customers, and recognize that a “one-size -fits-all approach” won’t maximize revenue. Publishers shouldn’t be tempted by the lore of the darkside or the iPad: You need to build your own online subscription strategy, one that allows for lots of different ways to package up your content and sell it.

I humbly implore all media companies who read this — downtrodden newspaper editors, heads of publishing houses, and CEOs of media businesses: don’t listen to Apple, Google, or Yahoo. Join the Rebellion. Help us save journalism.

As Yoda would say “Time to act, now is.” Follow the lead of the media rebels — now is the time to invest in a paywall and join the Rebellion.

Tien Tzuo is a Star Wars fan and CEO of subscription services company Zuora, which doesn’t just target print publishers but many kinds of membership services, streamed offerings, cloud services, and SaaS vendors. Tzou was previously one of the original members of the Salesforce.com team and built that company’s original billing system.

[Top image c/o StarWars.com]