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At the National Digital Media Conference in UCD, partially sponsored by Ireland.com, Mangan said the company would charge EUR79 per year for access to the paid sections of the site. Monthly access will cost EUR14 and weekly access will be EUR7. All prices are inclusive of VAT.
The on-line branch of the Irish Times newspaper announced earlier this year that it would introduce a fee-based system for access to some of its content on-line, including its archive. The move follows the firm's decision to introduce a fee-based e-mail service as well. Although much of the site's content will now be charged for, some information, including portions each day from The Irish Times and its Breaking News service, are expected to remain free.
A variety of issues are thought to be driving the decision, including the Irish Times' well-publicised cost cutting programme currently in progress. In December Ireland.com announced that would cut around 23 jobs as the firm told workers that the company needed to reduce its losses by EUR2.29 million for 2002 and that the redundancies will cut those losses by EUR0.63million.
Other factors are also making the move to a paid model possible, including what the company claims is a growing trend amongst content-driven Web sites all over the world to move to paid services. In fact, the announcement from Ireland.com comes on the day after the UK newspaper, the Financial Times, unveiled plans to charge for its FT.com Web site.
Like Ireland.com, FT.com was launched as a free service in the mid 1990s, but now the newspaper will charge readers up to STG200 per year for its premium services. The Times of London is also looking to charge readers for content later this year, although its plan would see only readers outside the UK pay for access.
Throughout cyberspace, publishers are facing increasing pressure to cut losses from Internet ventures following the dot.com fallout as advertising revenues alone have proven to be an insufficient sustenance to maintain big name Web sites. However, as with print newspapers, advertising will continue to make up large portions of the revenues for sites like FT.com, which says that subscriptions will only account for 10 percent of its revenues this year. That figure is not expected to go higher than 15 percent in 2003.
However, other sites, such as the Wall Street Journal on-line, which has been charging for its content for years but only has 640,000 subscribers compared to FT's 2.7 million, pulled 60 percent of its revenues from subscriptions in 2001.
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