Axel Springer has decided to add online paywalls on two of its German papers, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Hamburger Abendblatt, right after French newspaper Le Figaro and NYTimes.com, paidContent reported.

Monthly access to all content on morgenpost.de now costs €4.95 (£4.32/$6.79), while a premium monthly subscription to abendblatt.de is €7.95 (£6.93/$10.90).

It is free to acess national news on Abendblatt.de, but it costs extra for content specific to the Hamburg region. Subscriptions for both are renewed every month.

In December 2009, Axel Springer launched its paid-for iPhone apps for two of its other German titles, the tabloid BILD and DIE WELT. Christoph Keese, head of public affairs, also announced Axel Springer's intention to work with Google and other search engines to develop a direct payment system, which will charge for individual articles when people click on Google's search results.

Nieman Lab's Johnathan Stray has created a paywall calculator, Paywall!, that aims to juggle the different factors that could go into building a paywall and find the best combination that could generate maximum revenue. He takes the New York Times' proposed payment model as a basis: a certain number of articles per month can be viewed free, and after that readers will be asked to subscribe.

"The key to paywall revenue projections is to understand how different portions of the audience are affected differently," says Stray, and his model breaks the audience into five groups based on their number of page views per month: fly-by, occasional, weekly, daily, loyal. Depending on how many articles are offered free, it is unlikely that a huge number of visitors will be affected by a paywall, Stray points out, but the ones that will be are the loyal readers.

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Following in the footsteps of The New York Times, French news sites like L'Express and Le Figaro will be providing paid-for online content, Le Monde reported today. News magazine L'Express intends to propose a paywall in 2010, sometime in the second trimester. Online Director Corinne Denis said the publication is continuing to work on the project. However, their "model is not yet finalised" and is not profitable since its costs are higher than what subscriptions could bring.
Le Monde already provides certain pay-for features on its site. Meanwhile, Le Figaro mentioned that it was introducing a "premium" paywall option in January but put the plans on hold for a while. It may launch the feature in February, Le Monde added. Jeff Mignon, a French consultant in New York, pointed out that he did not believe that payable features would save the print press by compensating for advertising revenue loss, reported MaxiSciences. He added that, at the same time, we shouldn't judge publishers who take all sorts of initiatives to boost their profits.

The New York Times will launch a metered paid model on its Web site at the beginning of next year, the newspaper announced today. Under the plan, users to access more than a set number of articles per month will be asked to pay a flat fee for additional access. Print subscribers will be given full access, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"This process of rethinking our business model has also been driven by our desire to achieve additional revenue diversity that will make us less susceptible to the inevitable economic cycles," Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO, The New York Times Company, said in a press release. "We were also guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision."

A metered approach means Times content will still be visible online, and thus be able to continue selling a large audience to advertisers, The Times' David Carr wrote today.