$4 for one week? $7? $10? The Washington Post tests “flexible payments”

LINK: x.com ➚ | Posted by: Laura Hazard Owen | September 16, 2024

Washington Post readers who fear the commitment of a recurring credit card charge have a new option: A week-long site pass that doesn’t renew automatically and that, in our casual testing, cost between $4 and $10.

Back in May, Washington Post CEO Will Lewis told employees the paper was losing money and, as part of its response, would explore “a ‘flexible payment’ option to make it easier for readers to pay for news, since executives said it’s been a challenge to extract revenue from online readers who have not subscribed.”

Now some of those new payment options are here. Last week, in another employee memo (tweeted by Semafor’s Max Tani), Lewis wrote, “We launched the very first test of our flexible payments product, giving readers the ability to access the Post on their terms. This means we no longer have only one way to pay for the Post and this first test offers the option of paying for access to our content for seven full days.”

Nieman Lab staff switched to incognito browsers on our desktops and phones and poked around. We saw, variously, week-long offers ranging from $4 to $10, depending on device, browser, and articles clicked on to activate the paywall. (Going in through the Style section, for instance, resulted in the $7 offer.)

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