Press+ gains as One Pass, Ongo close

The pay-for-digital-content revolution is in full swing, as some players bow out and Press+ swoops in to scoop up the leftovers. Just last month, Google announced that it was folding its One Pass paid content service. In response to the closure, Press+ said it would grandfather at no charge the subscribers for any publishers that had used the Google service. Now Ongo, a subscription aggregation site that launched a year and a half ago with funding from the New York Times, Washington Post and Gannett, is shutting down as well. The shutdown of Ongo leaves Press+ as the largest remaining pay wall solution, with approximately 350 publishers using the service. And Press+ co-founder Gordon Crovitz believes that his company’s growth will only continue upward. “Pay walls won’t save news publishing by themselves, but … it’s the single biggest new source of revenue for papers,” he explained to The Wrap’s Brent Lang. And consumers are also coming around to the idea of pay walls, he proclaimed. “Between people paying for music online, books online, apps online, the idea of charging for digital content is much more familiar,” he told Lang. “Not every consumer is going to pay for every news brand, but they will pay for some news sources if the pricing is reasonable.”

The Globe and Mail seems to agree with that sentiment. The Canadian newspaper recently announced that it plans to implement a metered pay wall system this fall, asking readers to pay if they read more than a certain number of articles each month. “We have chosen to go for the big move rather than do it a step at a time,” said publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley. “Based on what we see going on in the advertising market, we’ve decided to go for it now. We had already made the decision; it was a case of how quickly we would do it.” But are digital subscription payment platforms like Press+ the answer? That’s still up in the air. As paidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen noted, “Ongo’s failure suggests pay wall implementation may be best left to individual papers—and that readers don’t want to pay for an aggregation site.”

• Ongo, an attempt at a pan-media paywalled aggregator, is closing (Nieman Journalism Lab)

• Paywall site Ongo, backed by NYT and WaPo, folds after 16 months (paidContent)

• Poynter asks loyal readers to donate using Press+ (Poynter)

• Paid Newspaper Aggregator Ongo Shuts Down (AllThingsD)

• As Google One Pass closes, Press+ gains momentum (World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers)

• Finally, Good News for Newspapers: Paywalls Are Paying Off (The Wrap)

• Globe to charge readers for online content (Globe and Mail)

• My personal take: 3 reasons I don’t like newspaper paywalls (GigaOm)

• Globe and Mail to introduce online paywall (Reuters)