Wall Street Journal to launch micropayment model

The Wall Street Journal, in a bid to survive the growing shift of newspaper readership from print to online, has announced it will implement a new micropayment subscription model on its website.

Robert Thomson, editor-in-chief of Dow Jones and managing editor of the Journal, told The Financial Times that “a sophisticated micropayments service” will launch this autumn. The system would charge small fees to occasional users who may not be willing to pay more than $100 a year for a subscription to WSJ.com, Thomson said.

The WSJ is not the first paper to try and maximize its online profits. In February, Newsday announced it will soon start charging for access to its online content. With print newspapers struggling to survive amid sinking ad revenue and dropping readership, expect more and more of them to start experimenting with online revenue ideas. These days more and more people go online for their news and it makes sense for the papers to do what they can to profit from it.