If you like Bloomberg.com, do you $35-a-month like it? That’s what the company is hoping: On Wednesday it rolled out a metered paywall starting at $35 a month, with 10 free articles a month. The Wall Street Journal’s Ben Mullin reported here, and here’s the note from Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait; in part:
Our paywall will be a metered one. At launch, you can view 10 articles each month at no charge, as well as 30 minutes of the Bloomberg TV livestream daily. After 10 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber. You can find detailed information at www.bloomberg.com/help. But, at launch, here are your two options:
— Digital, at $34.99 per month (after a $9.99 monthly trial offer for the first six months), includes full access to Bloomberg.com, Bloomberg mobile and tablet apps, a livestream of Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg videos, podcasts and subscriber-only daily newsletters.
— All Access, at $39.99 per month (after a $9.99 monthly trial offer for the first six months), includes unlimited digital access to all the content mentioned above, as well as the weekly Bloomberg Businessweek magazine and access to BloombergLIVE exclusive events.
Bloomberg Businessweek added its own paywall last year.
For $60/year more, they will throw in a free @BW subscription.This is serious money. @wsj: @business's new paywall will charge users $35 a month for Bloomberg https://t.co/xIlsgYrbD5
— Raju Narisetti (@raju) May 3, 2018
$35 a month is a lot, though the 10 free articles are generous since many other publications have reduced the freebies (The New York Times, for instance, recently halved the free articles per month to five). The cost is in line with monthly subscriptions to WSJ.com ($37/month once subscription offers run out) and FT.com (about $33/month). But will people who can’t expense it pay it for Bloomberg? Our Twitter says no!
I'll really miss you, Bloomberg! Keep in touch! https://t.co/bSiCPIR2Hp
— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) May 2, 2018
Can’t afford a WSJ subscription. Soon won’t be able to afford a Bloomberg subscription either. As premium publishers abandon broken adtech, readership is set to dwindle to the well-monied. #paywalled https://t.co/D5AwaQIpfz
— David Carroll 🦅 (@profcarroll) May 3, 2018
i'm in favor of paying to support good journalism in all its gorgeous forms; local papers in particular need all the help they can get, but bloomberg's $35/month ($420/year) paywall strikes me as a touch greedy and exclusionary for a company run by one of the world's richest men
— ryan sutton (@qualityrye) May 2, 2018
@Bloomberg goes from one extreme ($0.00) to the other w/ its $35/month ($420/yr) paywall. It is way too high. Readers will do their arbitrage between https://t.co/XCib4pM2bK, https://t.co/aQWhjeoL1G. I doubt Bloomberg can win (despite its editorial quality). pic.twitter.com/1grW96gA7B
— filloux (@filloux) May 2, 2018
Man, if Bloomberg News is going to a paywall, when it already has one of the great subsidy systems ever invented… I dunno. https://t.co/oUdVLX5inG
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 24, 2018
