Betting bible Racing Post is on course to reach 10,000 paying online subscribers for Racingpost.com as it re-invents itself as a multimedia racing platform — and more than a quarter of current members are are happy to pay almost £200 a year for a premium, “ultimate” subscription.
As Independent.co.uk reports, the title gained 3,000 paying subscribers in one week after launching its subscription service in July, with punters paying a minimum £7.50 a month for exclusive online-only pre- and post-race analysis, opinion columns and full access to the paper’s 20-year archive.
Readers can pay £9.50 for a premium race tips service or £199.95 a year for the deluxe membership which offers all that plus an online subscription to the Racing UK TV channel
But the paywall is not a particularly tall one: the site’s general news, race coverage, race odds and tips is all free. But if you want online video and historic horse form — and it seems that bookmakers, professional gamblers and betting enthusiasts do — you have to pay. As the Post‘s CEO Alan Byrne tells the Indie, the paper’s freemium model has a clear parallel with business newspapers: “Rather like the FT, we are analysing data and focusing on a series of markets. In our case, they happen to be horse races, the Premiership or even The X Factor.”
As our own research into consumer attitudes to paid content this week shows, a tiny proportion of people are willing to pay for general interest online news. But where there is a content niche, preferably aimed at a professional audience, evidence shows that some members of specific groups will part with cash for coverage they can’t get anywhere else.
The Post has been planning to monetise its online archive and to do digital-only publishing since the FL Partners consortium bought it from Trinity Mirror in 2007 (via PG).

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