Payment Mode Research On Morning Herald

Digital content of the conventional newspaper enterprise has been stimulated bythe fast development of internet industry. Pay-wall has been adopted by theconventional international newspaper mass media recently, promoting the researchinteresting from industry and academic society.Some academic achievements havebeen obtained through existing domestic researches related to this topic; however,they were mostly focus on the problem of whether the digital content should becharged or not, or just simply introduction to such strategy. There is still no clearlydefinition of payment model, neither comparison analysis has been carried out.Morning Herald, a daily newspaper published in Changsha, is selected for CaseStudy here-in. The establishment and development of this newspaper’s digital contentwas studied, based on Pay Wall Theory. Three main parts were analyzed in details,which are Strategic Positioning, Operation Systems and Profit Model, respectively.Proper selection of digital content and corresponding potential readers, along with thedelegate design of its information priorities, is the sources of its success. Comparedwith digital subscriptions offered by other newspapers, advantages and disadvantagesof the Payment Mode of Morning Herald were summarized. Problems andcorresponding optimization suggestions were reveled and discussed in this thesis.Some deficiencies were noticed during the development of charged digitalcontent of Morning Herald, such as lack of characteristics, imperfect copyrightprotection, homogeneous competition, inadequate marketing promotion and imperfectuser experience, respectively. The methods to solve these problems are: increasing thevalue of the charged information, introducing pay-back mode to promote theinteractive activities between readers and resources, introducing Author chargessystem to extend the incoming sources, enhancing the individualization of newscontent to improve the users experience, cultivating long-term relation with thereaders to offer improved service.