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Frequent visitors to the Mountain View Voice website will soon need to either become subscribing members to obtain full access to unlimited online content or purchase individual stories as they read them.
The new “pay meter” system is similar to what many other media websites, including the New York Times, have instituted over the last few years in order to increase revenue from readers and reduce their reliance on advertising.
The pay-per-story “micropayment” option is a new but growing phenomenon in the media world, as publishers try to offer payment alternatives to subscriptions.
Mountain View Voice website visitors who are already subscribing members to the printed Mountain View Voice through the Support Local Journalism program will have full access to all website content without additional payment, but they will need to create a user account and log in.
“Unlike most newspapers, which have cut back on the breadth of their local news coverage, we have worked hard to maintain the level of professional reporting desired by our steadily growing print and online readership,” said Bill Johnson, president of Embarcadero Media, which publishes the Voice and Mountain View Online.
“But as local retailers feel the squeeze of online sellers and big box stores, the growth in revenue we need in order to meet our expenses and to expand our coverage of the community needs to come from those who directly benefit from it – our loyal readers,” Johnson said. “Many of our most avid online readers have not yet become subscribing members and many don’t even realize it. That’s the group we need to convert into regularly paying members.”
Visitors to the Mountain View Voice website will be able to view 25 stories per month before being required to pay, although this number will be adjusted downward over time. Not all content counts toward the limit; views of the event calendar, obituaries and Fogster classifieds are all exempt. Return visits to a story already viewed also do not count, so a reader can make and follow comments in Town Square without using up his or her monthly quota of free stories.
Readers will be able to choose between a 7-day pass for $2, a month pass for $6 or an annual subscription/membership for $60 (which includes delivery of the Mountain View Voice to those living in Mountain View). An auto-pay plan for $5 per month is also available.
Those who become subscribing members on the Mountain View Voice website will also have unlimited free access to Embarcadero Media’s other websites, including Palo Alto Online and and AlmanacNews.com.
Only subscribing members will be able to access stories that are more than three months old from the online archives of the Mountain View Voice, although individual stories may be purchased for 25 cents.
The pay meter system is now in operation, but frequent visitors will not encounter it for several days or weeks, depending on the number of stories they typically view each day. An opportunity to subscribe will appear after 15 stories have been viewed and then a counter is displayed that shows the cumulative number of stories read.
Mountain View Online today attracts more than 45,000 unique visitors each month, most of them from the immediate local area.
While pay metering systems are in widespread use on websites operated by daily newspapers, the Embarcadero Media websites are the first known websites of weekly newspapers in the United States to implement such a system.
Embarcadero Media’s pay metering system is being implemented through San Francisco-based CoinTent, a micropayment and subscription paywall service.
Readers with questions or having difficulty setting up accounts should email info@mv-voice.com or read the frequently asked questions page.
– Mountain View Voice staff
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– Mountain View Voice staff
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– Mountain View Voice staff
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RIP Mountain View Voice.
Palo Alto Weekly is doing this also (and has restricted the thread to registered members only). This to me is a bad move.
As to whether we should pay for our news that is one thing. I often pick up a newspaper (sometimes paying) and it is very anonymous. I don’t see why any big brother should be able to see what type of article any one person decides to read, or to ignore.
I read the PA Weekly and I read the MV Voice. I don’t believe either are islands and spend a lot of time (and money) in Mountain View. I also don’t think it is right or proper for these newspapers to collate any type of information on its readership. I don’t trust that they can keep our information secure.
Apple is refusing to comply with the FBI on security aspects. I refuse to comply with local newspapers for similar reasons.
@PA Resident:
Both PA Weekly (a.k.a. Palo Alto Online), Mountain View Voice and The Almanac are all published by Embarcadero Media. It is their choice whether or not to charge for online content, just like streaming services such as Netflix or other news sites like Wall Street Journal.
Whether or not the content authored by Embarcadero Media is valuable enough to draw a substantial paid readership will be seen. Other news sites have put some of their content behind paywalls with varying degrees of success.
My guess is that ultimately this will reduce their activity at social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. Also, readership participation in comments will likely suffer as well as overall pageviews and regular online readership numbers.
At least they are keeping the events calendar available for all.
I will probably limit my reading to The Peninsula Foodist and The Food Party! blogs.
Oh well…
I already donate $120.00 annually to “support local journalism” and I also prefer to remain as anonymous as possible online, so this setup may be the end of my annual support of local journalism overall.
Incidentally, I just received my subscription renewal notification in my mailbox a couple of days ago and there’s not a word about the change in online access terms in the renewal notice.
Random, I thought the comparison between the Mountain View Voice and the New York Times was amusing, even if it was only likening it to a revenue stream generation system that the New York Times utilizes…still, amusing.
What about the residents who can sign up for a “free copy of the paper” but chose to read online for obvious reasons?
MV Voice advertising has gotten too expensive for local businesses?
I guess the Voice didn’t do a thorough or persuasive enough job while informing the community about issues local businesses face like living wages and housing, and the consequences that could result or have resulted. That would’ve supported one of their main funding sources. Oh well, they can always get money elsewhere… Let the gentrification of the Voice begin!
Stories to look forward to on the Voice over the next couple of years:
– How to Staff a Small Business Using High Turnover, Limited Availability, Low Commitment, High School Labor
– Affordable Shift-Living for the Tech Worker: Three Sets of Tenants, Eight Hours at a Time
– Google Takes Cue from Disney World – Secedes from Mountain View Establishing Own Civic Government and Services, School District; Residents to Receive Tax-Free Perks Like: Free Food Delivery, Driverless Transportation, Free Internet, Free Subscriptions to the Google Voice, a Lack of Privacy
I wonder if they count each time you click to comment. This will kill spirited debate.
And they they get hit by some anonymous attack on their website and all your names and credit card numbers will be stolen and used in identity theft to steal all your money.
With all the free stuff online this would be a big mistake. Or how about reducing the staff? Oh wait, Unions won’t allow that, they need to take their share from more paychecks.
Arguments about anonymous comments such as this aside, being able to anonymously read articles is important as discussed above.
Will you accept bitcoin?
I get the daily digest headlines and occasionally click the link to read a story. The main reason I read online is to avoid getting a paper copy, which will end up in the recycle bin/ landfill eventually.
Good luck with this. One less thing to clutter up my inbox…
Well this stinks! The articles and comments in the Voice are such an important hub for community engagement. At the very least, requiring registration and putting up a paywall will skew the participation to a smaller and less representative group.
I know our local papers are starving for revenue, as are most sources of journalism. I’m curious what other models were tried or considered– for example Wikipedia and NPR have both been pretty successful with periodic pledge drives, where a subset of the community can support the rest. At the very least, it would be great if we could pay a single fee to support all of the local papers– PA Online, MV Voice, SJ Mercury News, etc.
Hmm… 25 stories per month, or about 1 story per day. I guess I’ll start being a lot more selective about which articles I click on when I get the digest email from express@mv-voice.com
Thanks for all the comments and questions. Let me try to clear up a few misunderstandings and clarify the new system.
Most of these questions are answered in the FAQ we prepared, so I encourage you to take a look. http://www.mv-voice.com/user/faq
Perhaps most important for those of you using Town Square is to make clear that once you have read a story you can return to it as often as you like, read and post comments, without it counting again toward your 25 story allowance.
For those of you active on one of our other websites, such as Palo Alto Online, the story counts are independent. So you have 25 stories on each site before the pay meter kicks in. Once you are a paid subscriber on one website, you get unlimited access to all of our websites.
As for those of you concerned about anonymity, we don’t require any personal information when registering unless you are already a subscribing member of the printed Mountain View Voice, in which case we need your name and address to verify your subscription. If you participate in Town Square, you aren’t required to use your full name nor are you required to log in (unless the specific topic is restricted to logged in users.)
We don’t store any credit card information on our servers; the transactions are all managed through our vendor, CoinTent, which complies with all legal requirements for credit card transactions and encryption security technology.
As the article states, our goal in implementing this system is to get the people who most value our website and its contents (as measured by how often they come) to pay a small amount to offset some of our costs. Many of you are already supporting the work of the Voice through subscriptions to the print paper even though it’s a freely distributed paper because you want to see strong local journalism in our community. But for those of you who don’t think $5/month (17 cents a day) is worth it, that is a decision for you to make and you’ll still get to read your free allotment of articles. Either way, we appreciate the fact that you value our content enough to protest this new policy.
Sorry, Sir, I USED to subscribe. Does my parents subscription count? When we got the copy of the Palo Alto paper to read at REACH speech therapy, it helped get stroke victims ( like myself ) to recover. I guess that free perk is gone too. I guess ad revenue isn’t enough.
When you add CENSORSHIP to the mix, deliberately distorting what a person says, maybe that means time to quit.
May you live in interesting times.
Bye, for now.
Even your verification code has an fu in it.
To owners/managers of the M.V. Voice:
While I understand the desire of the management of the M.V. Voice to increase revenue, I think this may be a self-defeating way to go about it. Many people first learn of the M.V. Voice because people they know point them to some on-line article and the resulting comments section. I had mostly ignored the Voice for many years. I knew it existed but did not bother picking it up or reading the print versions let alone the on-line version. Then one day someone sent me a link about a critical issue being written about and the comments section discussions. Now I am a regular.
There should be better ways to give advertisers more “eyes-on” to their ads than this new policy. Seeing ads on the sides of the on-line articles would be another way to make the advertisers more bang for their advertising buck.
The last thing you should do is make it more difficult for people of lower income to have free access to the local news.