PleasantonWeekly.com launches ‘pay meter’

Frequent visitors to the PleasantonWeekly.com website will need to either become subscribing members to obtain full access to unlimited online content or purchase individual stories as they read them.

The new “pay meter” system is similar to what many other media websites, including the New York Times, have instituted over the last few years in order to increase revenue from readers and reduce their reliance on advertising.

The pay-per-story “micropayment” option is a new but growing phenomenon in the media world, as publishers try to offer payment alternatives to subscriptions.

PleasantonWeekly.com visitors who are already subscribing members to the printed Pleasanton Weekly through the Support Local Journalism program will have full access to all of PleasantonWeekly.com without additional payment, but they will need to create a user account and login.

“Unlike most newspapers, which have cut back on the breadth of their local news coverage, we have worked hard to maintain the level of professional reporting desired by our steadily growing print and online readership,” said Gina Channell-Allen, East Bay president of Embarcadero Media, which publishes the Pleasanton Weekly and this website.

“But as local retailers feel the squeeze of online sellers and big box stores, the growth in revenue we need in order to meet our expenses and to expand our coverage of the community needs to come from those who directly benefit from it – our loyal readers,” Channell-Allen said. “Many of our most avid online readers have not yet become subscribing members and many don’t even realize it. That’s the group we need to convert into regularly paying members.”

Visitors to PleasantonWeekly.com will be able to view 25 stories per month before being required to pay, although this number will be adjusted downward over time. Not all content counts toward the limit; views of the event calendar, obituaries and Fogster classifieds are all exempt. Return visits to a story already viewed also do not count, so a reader can make and follow comments in Town Square without using up his or her monthly quota of free stories.

Readers will be able to choose between a 7-day pass for $2, a month pass for $6 or an annual subscription/membership for $60 (which includes delivery of the Pleasanton Weekly to residents of Pleasanton.) An auto-pay plan for $5 per month is also available.

Those who become subscribing members on PleasantonWeekly.com will also have unlimited free access to Embarcadero Media’s other websites, including DanvilleSanRamon.com.

Only subscribing members will be able to access stories that are more than three months old from the online archives of the Pleasanton Weekly, although individual stories may be purchased for 25 cents.

The pay meter system is now in operation, but frequent visitors will not encounter it for several days or weeks, depending on the number of stories they typically view each day. An opportunity to subscribe will appear after 15 stories have been viewed and then a counter is displayed that shows the cumulative number of stories read.

PleasantonWeekly.com attracts approximately 50,000 unique visitors each month, most from the immediate local area.

While pay metering systems are in widespread use on websites operated by daily newspapers, the Embarcadero Media websites are the first known websites of weekly newspapers in the United States to implement such a system.

Embarcadero Media’s pay metering system is being implemented through San Francisco-based CoinTent, a micropayment and subscription paywall service.

Readers with questions or having difficulty with setting up accounts should email info@pleasantonweekly.com or read the frequently asked questions page.