[Klaus]

Of course, paywalls failed ... so far ... because the sites were able to have a sufficient income from ads.

However, if ads are no longer a source of sustainable income - and I am expecting this to happen within a few years ACROSS the board - most content-driven sites will introduce a paywall and block ad-blocker browsers. TODAY it's easy to say that you will just go elsewhere then - but, sorry to say that - tomorrow there'll be little left of this "free" elsewhere.

 

It has to be understood that somebody has to pay the bill.  As mentioned the costs for running PZ as is is around the 30.000$ mark (without any salary) - I cannot and will not pay this out of my pockets.

 

As far as I can tell there are generally 3 models for online magazines and newspapers:

- ads

- paywall (which can have many flavours)

- sponsorship by a company

 

The web advertising market is about to fall apart although I reckon it'll remain a part of the mix. Sponsorships are usually impossible ("photozone - sponsored by Canon" - good joke ...).

 

As far as (relevant) photo gear review sites are concerned I am expecting that three sites will do it without paywalls on the long term:

- dpreview ... because they are an Amazon subsidiary and their sheer size is generating the sufficient numbers

- lensrentals ... because it contributes to their core business model to entertain readers

- dxomark ... as a side effect of their primary business

So these three  are part of the sponsored category. If that's good enough - well, no worries then.

All other sites will either disappear (the majority) or introduce a paywall of some kind. 

 

Whether PZ will go down ... well, this is up to you really. We can't do anything about it.

 

However, again, we are not planning to introduce a paywall this year.

 

FWIW, the next (ad-supported ...) review will be up on Monday.

[stevenb]

I doubt that many would pay any pay wall fee.

 

 

Actually i pay 18 Euro annually for the Nikon Fotografie-Forum and 12 Euro annually for a wine-forum.

[stevenb]

 

- sponsorship by a company

 

The web advertising market is about to fall apart although I reckon it'll remain a part of the mix. Sponsorships are usually impossible ("photozone - sponsored by Canon" - good joke ...).

 

 

Sponsored by a Tripod-Company, a book-publishing house,... maybe it could be more than a joke.

[Brightcolours]

Actually i pay 18 Euro annually for the Nikon Fotografie-Forum and 12 Euro annually for a wine-forum.

So PZ would have your 20 euros per year. That will pay the bills. 

[stevenb]

So PZ would have your 20 euros per year. That will pay the bills. 

You are still missing the point:

 

"It has to be understood that somebody has to pay the bill.  As mentioned the costs for running PZ as it is around the 30.000$ mark (without any salary) - I cannot and will not pay this out of my pockets."

 

15.000 people willing to pay 20 Euro for one year is not a realistic option?

[Klaus]

I think 20 EUR is too much. Given the fact that we do this on a semi-commercial basis (thus we can't guarantee to deliver content and we only do it part-time), it could be an annual fee of  around 10EUR/US$ for ad-free content. That is the mainstream amount of what at least a few people are willing to donate today (5$ are rarely selected). That would translate to 0.25c per review or so. 

 

I reckon once Markus is back from the dark side we could do many more reviews but ...

[Brightcolours]

You are still missing the point:

 

"It has to be understood that somebody has to pay the bill.  As mentioned the costs for running PZ as it is around the 30.000$ mark (without any salary) - I cannot and will not pay this out of my pockets."

 

15.000 people willing to pay 20 Euro for one year is not a realistic option?

Yes, that is not a realistic option. And 15.000 x 20 = 300.000 

 

How it is now, PZ gets exposure by being free. People can direct others in search of lens reviews to PZ in for instance photography forums. I do that on a regular basis (often to show what a joke DXO lens "test" results are).

Suppose you actually have 1500 people who would have payed 20 euros in one year. None of those can then point others to PZ results. Not all those 1500 people will pay the 20 euros the year after, even less the year after. Things will die off quickly.

 

That certain ad sellers, and certain websites using ads, ruin the user web-experience and that that drives people towards ad-blockers, I understand. That is a problem for PZ, which does NOT use intrusive ads, and has no blame therefore. 

In my opinion, all that PZ can do is make itself more visible. A .com domain may help, striving for a higher google ranking may help. You can't make the ad block programs go away, so you have to increase the amount of visitors to equal the revenue loss out.

[Klaus]

Well, we have a static audience of 50%. I suspect that there's little inflow/outflow at this stage - make it 15% per year. So most of the other 50% are one-time visitors. The hype is over, the (hardware) market has collapsed enough to be more or less constant from here on. There'll be no increase in this market again - let's not have illusions about this. 

 

Honestly I don't believe that changing the site or increasing the review output will make a difference. Everything we would do to increase the (ad-relevant) traffic will be eaten away by the increasing use of ad blockers. It has already been proven that once users activate ad-blockers, the vast majority will never ever disable it on "friendly" sites (yes, exceptions apply, of course). It's not as if I don't understand this - who loves ads after all? But the inevitable consequence of this will be an internet with much less information diversity in a few years time. Again, somebody has to pay the bills.  

 

If we are going to introduce a paywall for ad-blocker users at some stage, we'll lose a lot of readers, of course. Now does it make a difference to lose ad-blocker users that only produce costs ? I mean think about that for a sec. It's like those who do fare evasion in public transport won't use public transport anymore. How much would this hurt the public transport company ... ? 

 

But maybe I'm wrong about all this. We'll see. As for the time being photozone will remain public.

[youpii]

If we are going to introduce a paywall for ad-blocker users at some stage, we'll lose a lot of readers, of course. Now does it make a difference to lose ad-blocker users that only produce costs ? I mean think about that for a sec. It's like those who do fare evasion in public transport won't use public transport anymore. How much would this hurt the public transport company ... ? 

 

But maybe I'm wrong about all this. We'll see. As for the time being photozone will remain public.

 

It would make sense to lower the costs by cutting out readers that only generate costs.

I'm a bit curious about the 30.000$ costs. Didn't costs went down with Amazon hosting and the like?

[chrismiller]

A number of news papers in the UK allow a few articles to be read before the pay wall kickes in. Maybe that could be an option, new users are not alienated, but users wanting to read a number of reviews are required to pay up?