The Sun is to start to make content available outside its digital paywall for the first time as the tabloid aims to capitalise on the explosion of news sharing on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Mike Darcey, the chief executive of News UK, said that from early July “select digital content” will be made available for free.
“Since last summer, we have been working on a cross-departmental project to re-imagine the Sun and evolve its business model to take account of rapid changes in technology and the way readers are accessing and sharing news,” he said in an internal memo to staff on Friday.
“The guiding principle for the free content will be shareability, helping us to take advantage of the growing trend of readers finding and sharing content on social media, given further impetus by the rapid rise in smartphone use.”
Darcey said that most of the content put outside the paywall will be developed on a bespoke basis by new teams, but that editors will be able to “deploy other Sun stories, especially ones well covered by competitors”.
He said that general news and sports were content areas this strategy would be employed first.
The Sun has been behind a paywall since August 2013 and in December said it had signed up about 225,000 subscribers to its £2-a-week digital service Sun+.
However, the Sun has spent tens of millions of pounds on exclusive rights, its deal for Premier League goal clips alone is thought to have cost at least £30m over three years.
And the audience-killing paywall has made the site less attractive to advertisers.
“We can extend the reach of The Sun brand, bring more people into a Sun conversation and provide an entry point to our paid propositions, both print and digital,” said Darcey. “At the same time, we will be expanding our pool of digital inventory, making us better placed to respond to the calls of advertisers for solutions across print and digital”.
Darcey said that the relaxation of the paywall would not be done in any way that would undermine its pay strategy.
“we need to be true to The Sun brand, while also ensuring that our free digital presence is differentiated from, and does not diminish the value of, the paid edition,” he said. “We will engage with social media, while avoiding becoming merely a news feed for other aggregator brands. We will also make sure that we execute this shift in a way that provides a net positive contribution to profitability”.
The Sun had experimented with making some content available beyond the paywall, launching Sun Nation, a light political site, in the run-up to the general election in May.
“This is the beginning, not the end, of our evolution of The Sun, as we continue to look across the range of content distribution models at News Corp properties globally for lessons learned,” he said. “we will continue to experiment and adapt, responding to changes in the marketplace and technology”.