Powerpoint presentation of Ernie Schreiber, Editor for Content Development of Lancaster Newspapers Inc., for the "Building the new model" panel of the APME Conference on Oct. 20, 2010 at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

1. An experiment with metered pay
Test: Ask out-of-market, non-subscribers to
pay for reading more than seven obituary
pages per month.

2. Lessons Learned: Traffic
1) Downside: In forecasting subscribers or revenue, analytic programs
can overestimate “unique” users.
Using Scout Analytics, we discovered that other widely-used analytics
programs, as well as user cookie deletion, had overstated our unique readers
by 10 times or more.
2) Upside: There was no loss of online readership with a metered model.
Because occasional readers – who account for the majority of page views –
never hit the pay wall, there has been no loss of readership. Surprisingly,
there has been a sustained gain of readership.

3. Lessons Learned: Traffic, cont.
• Traffic to obits.lancasteronline.com for the 9-week period, July 12 – Oct. 15,
compared to comparable period in 2009:
Metric 2009 2010 % increase
Pageviews 776,610 851,264 9.6%
Uniques 479,267 575,899 20.2%
Time/Page 1:04 1:07 4.7%

4. Lessons Learned: Reaction
3) Reader complaints were surprisingly small.
• For every five successful subscriptions, we received one complaint.
• Half of complaints were technical in nature and easily resolvable.
• The other half were annoyed or angry that we would charge for
content that had been free.
• We responded to each, explaining that we could not give away a
product that cost money to produce.
• That won over 9% of the complainers as subscribers.

5. Lessons Learned: Strategies
4) Don’t worry about trying to define your unique content.
Allow readers to define what is important content for themselves.
5) Find a way to avoid cookie-based identification of readers.

6. Contacts:
1) Ernie Schreiber eschreiber@Lnpnews.com
LancasterOnline.com 717-291-8750
2) Matt Skibinski Matthew.Skibinski@journalismonline.com
Press+ 212-332-6408
3) Greg Chagaris chagaris@outsellinc.com
Scout Analytics 650-342-7123