If you weren’t already aware that this development was in the works, it might have surprised you to see an unfamiliar sight on CNN.com today as you scroll around the page. It’s actually a small, easy-to-miss banner, and the one I saw was attached to a “Race for the White House” news update. The banner, a first for the heavily trafficked site that gets hundreds of millions of visitors a month, read simply: “For subscribers.”
Click on that story, and you’d have been greeted with a message at the bottom of the page, explaining that you can “Keep reading with a CNN subscription.” The article, it adds, is for subscribers only — and you can become one for less than $1 a week.
I actually never thought I’d see the day, but here we are: Fly-by visitors to CNN.com have now been put on notice, as the network’s experiment with a paywall has begun.
CNN has embraced the Digital Age in a kind of, shall we say, one step forward and two steps back fashion. It launched CNN+ (a good move) in early 2022, but then shut it down a mere month later (a questionable move) because subscriber uptake wasn’t fast enough. In a whirlwind of parentco-mandated cost-cutting that followed, CNN also announced it was pulling way back on its original series and documentary films — months before the network’s stirring documentary Navalny won an Oscar. A documentary that’s so good, I should add, that I saw it twice in the theater, on back-to-back nights.
The new regime at CNN, under the leadership of former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, seems to be keenly aware of both its challenges and what the road ahead requires. Hundreds of millions of visitors come to CNN.com every month — in August alone, the site pulled in more visitors than The New York Times. The network would be foolish not to try and monetize all that traffic outside of flinging ads at them here and there, right?
CNN is looking to convince online visitors to pay $3.99 a month, or $29.99 a year, for access to all of the site’s content.
Overhanging this move, of course, is the brand value that it obviously required. CNN, in other words, is asking visitors to pay up at a time when the network continues to get trounced by its closest rival MSNBC — which topped CNN for the 15th straight quarter during the third quarter of this year. Obviously, the audiences that watch TV versus come to the website don’t overlap perfectly, but one nevertheless wonders if this is the most ideal time for CNN to be asking anyone for more money.
