The Irish News has turned its paywall technology into a revenue generating opportunity by selling it to other news publishers, Journalism.co.uk reported yesterday.

The page-turning service was developed in-house, and the Belfast-based regional title is offering to sell other publishers a subscription and digital edition service as product packages. Starting at £465, the service includes server resources, bandwidth and video streaming for digital editions.
"When the paper was available for free, apart from the cost of running the website, we were losing readers of the paid for paper to the free online model, which was economic madness. Now readers have a clear and equitable choice, pay for a printed newspaper or pay for the same paper online," Liam McMullen, systems and resource manager, told Journalism.co.uk. He also noted that creating their own in-house paywall technology has helped the group to have greater control over the product and offer more a customised personal service to its readers.

The service has so far been well received by its readers and the newspaper has no plans to bring down its paywall and re-introduce free content, McMullen told Journalism.co.uk. He added that the newspaper isn't stopping there with its technology, and will continue to try and serve advertisers better by targeting advertising around news on its Web site, and optimising potentials of the mobile medium.

The regional Irish newspaper offers subscriptions and the digital edition as a product package. Having transitioned from a partially-free, part-paid model to a subscription-only access, the newspaper readers are required to pay for access to its digital edition, £5 for a week, £15 for a month and £150 for a year package comprising of 312 editions.