Business commentator and former Fairfax editor Alan Kohler has welcomed the rush by Fairfax Media and News Ltd to start charging for their digital content, saying it would drive growth for free online news like Business Spectator.
News Ltd and Fairfax Media this week detailed their plans to start charging for iPad apps and restrict access to their website content later this year.
Kohler, who stood down today as CEO of Australian Independent Business Media (AIBM), said the paywall strategy from major publishers could not come soon enough for AIBM, which publishes a series of online industry verticals including Business Spectator, Technology Spectator and investors newsletter The Eureka Report, which had about 15,000 subscribers.
"I really want Fairfax and News going behind walls because we're going to stay free," he told AdNews. "The reason they are looking at paywalls is because of their legacy costs, which they can't reduce sufficiently because they're still publishing newspapers. If you publish a newspaper and run a news website, you can't get your costs down enough."
Kohler said Business Spectator was generating about 450,000 UB's a month, up from an average of 350,000 through 2010. He said The Australian Business section online was doing about 1.3 million UB's per month and SMH's Business Day about 1.9 million. He expected a significant rise in online traffic as those sections restricted free access to their content.
Kohler's exit as CEO at AIBM was part of a restructure of the company, which included hiring former ninemsn national sales director Nicholas Gray as general manager and publisher of Business Spectator Group. The company had also appointed the former head of Macquarie Group's direct investing and online, James Leplaw, as GM and Publisher of the Eureka Report.
Kohler, who presents the nightly business bulletin for the ABC News and anchors the broadcaster's weekend business show, will keep his current TV and writing roles while looking at new projects.
"I've been tearing around like an idiot," he said. "All I know now is I'm going to have more time and I've got more output available to produce. The question is what I do with that? Do we create something new? I'd be more specific if I knew."
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