While most of Fleet Street was talking about paywalls, the Daily Mail used its investor day on 19 April 2010 to explain to shareholders why it intended to keep its website free. The slides made the case in four lines: “Readers will not pay to consume general news on the web”; “All news has traditionally been free – except print”; “People pay for the convenience of print in recognition of the special cost of production and delivery of a tangible product and because they purchase it whole”; “Which is why they will also pay for news on mobile devices”. Niche paid-for web content was named as something the publisher would experiment with.
The reading offered here was that the Mail had identified the right problem. People do not buy a newspaper because they are comfortable paying for news; they buy a convenient package of many things they might want, horoscopes, crosswords and Sudoku included. The threat to print is not the reluctance to pay online but the unbundling of that package. Which is why the strategy was about new products and devices: what was for sale was convenience, not news.