BERLIN — Europe's top-selling newspaper said Monday it will introduce a paywall for part of its online offerings starting next month.
Main news stories will remain free of charge online, but a subscription will be required to view features, interviews, and other exclusive content, German tabloid Bild said.
The basic digital subscription will cost $6.50 per month starting June 11, and twice that for a premium version that includes the tabloid as an e-paper. The Axel Springer AG-owned newspaper will also offer readers buying a print copy, at 91 cents a day, a pass to its online content. The pass will be unique to each paper, thanks to a new printing technique, which the company calls a ''world premiere'' for the industry.
The move comes as Europe's newspaper publishers struggle to make up for lost advertisement revenue and shrinking circulation numbers. Analysts say publishers across Europe will be closely watching whether Bild's paywall will succeed, as many of them hope to follow the move of Europe's biggest publishing house.
Bild's online offering is currently Germany's top news website — a position it hopes to defend by hiding only some content behind the paywall. The company decided against a metered paywall — which limits users to a number of free articles per month, a model championed by The New York Times. Instead, Bild will decide on a daily basis which articles or video products will be labeled as premium content that requires a so-called Bild plus subscription. It is planning to increase the share of paid content over time, hoping that readers will be increasingly ready to pay for it.
''We know it can also go wrong,'' acknowledged Axel Springer CEO Mathias Doepfner. ''But the tendency is clear toward pay models online,'' he said, adding there is no choice but to seek new revenue streams to fund quality newsgathering and in-depth reporting.
An additional service featuring video footage from soccer games will cost an extra $3.87 a month.
Bild's move is the first significant attempt to make users in Europe's biggest economy pay for reading their news online.
Doepfner said the company has no expectations for the new business to generate millions of euros in new revenues right away.
An increasing number of US newspapers also are starting to charge customers for online content; most recently The Washington Post announced the introduction of a digital subscription plan. The Boston Globe has a paid website, bostonglobe.com, and a free version, boston.com.
Trends in the European newspaper industry overall appear to follow those set by their US peers, with falling revenues leading to paper closures as readers switch to view their news online or on tablet computers.