The Honolulu Civil Beat and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser both introduced paywalls a couple of years ago. Now their strategies are showing signs of stagnation.
It was billed as the Pugnacious Polynesian Paywall Punch-Up.
Honolulu Civil Beat, a local news site backed by eBay founder
Pierre Omidyar, launched in 2010 with an ad-free business model built on digital subscriptions. About a year later, the
Honolulu Star-Advertiserput up a paywall of its own. The move set up a
showdown between the two news organizations as they competed for subscribers.The fight, however, is fizzling. The trajectory of each publication’s paywall appears to be mimicking industry-wide trends of slow paywall growth: It looks as if there’s a limit in the number of people who are willing to pay for news online.
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