Digital First Media CEO John Paton said on Monday that the company would expand its pay meters to all 75 of its daily newspapers beginning Monday.
The expansion, which builds upon meters already in place at 23 of its MediaNews Group dailies, will begin with the St. Paul Pioneer Press and continue rolling out to other papers over the next two months.
Paton, who has been critical of paywalls as a myopic strategy in the past, said the move had become indispensable.
"At the end of the day, digital subscriptions will be a stack of pennies instead of a stack of dimes, but we need the pennies," he said.
Over the next two years, Paton projects those pennies will add up to tens of millions of dollars of additional profit. "This will be substantial," he said. "I'm using it now as a tactic because I can see over the next couple of years just how much operating profit that can bring in."
Paton described the tactic as "necessary gas in the tank making this digital transition."
He said that the company's AdTaxi product and efforts through Digital First Ventures had buttressed its digital revenue, along with widespread use of Google Consumer Surveys.
"The Google Consumer Surveys were stronger in the beginning, but they really did depress traffic and over a period of time became less effective from a revenue perspective," he said.
The new meters will be set at varying levels in each market, Paton added. "It's not one size fits all," he said.
Paton also indicated that new editorial products would be part of the rollout, which he explained in a blog post on Monday.
"It's the right thing to do to stay on strategy," he said of the meters. "The strategy really is building out the digital products."
