The Apple Daily will charge a monthly subscription fee to access its online content from September, Next Media Group founder Jimmy Lai (黎智英) said yesterday.
The Chinese-language newspaper will be the nation’s first daily to charge for online access.
Such an announcement had been widely expected after the group in April began requiring people to register for accounts before being able to read news stories on the Apple Daily Web site.
People who have already registered can continue accessing online news articles by paying NT$10, starting on Monday next week, for a trial subscription that would be valid until the end of August, Lai said in a video posted online.
Subscription plans would be made public by the middle of August at the latest, and users would be able cancel their subscriptions if they do not like the plans, Lai said.
“We want to keep our prices low because we want to attract as many as subscribers as possible. In this way, the public can still hear a loud and important voice in our society,” Lai said.
As of Sunday, the paper’s Web site had about 3.17 million subscribers.
Non-subscribers can only see one paragraph of each story in the breaking news “recommended by the editors” section and must subscribe if they want to read the rest of the story.
In one of his Apple Daily columns in July last year, Lai wrote that he saw paid online subscriptions as a salvation for the newspaper industry, because it has helped the New York Times.
The New York Times Co in February said that its digital revenue last year was more than US$709 million and it was on track to meet its goal of US$800 million by the end of next year.
More than 3.3 million people pay for the Times’ digital products, including its news, crossword puzzle and food apps — a 27 percent jump from 2017 — and the total number of paid subscriptions for digital and print has reached 4.3 million, the company said.
The Times has set a goal of 10 million online subscribers by 2025.
Lai, who founded the Next Media Group in Hong Kong, said he decided in 2001 to publish Taiwanese editions of his two main Hong Kong publications — Next Magazine and the Apple Daily — following Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) election as president in March 2000, as he saw business opportunities arising from an increasingly democratic nation.
The success of Next Magazine and the Apple Daily in Taiwan — two of the nation’s most popular publications — has been attributed to their extensive tabloid-style coverage of celebrities and politicians.
The Hong Kong edition of Next went digital on March 21 last year, followed by the Taiwanese edition on April 4.
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
ALLEGED SABOTAGE: The damage inflicted by the vessel did not affect connection, as data were immediately rerouted to other cables, Chunghwa Telecom said Taiwan suspects that a Chinese-owned cargo vessel damaged an undersea cable near its northeastern coast on Friday, in an alleged act of sabotage that highlights the vulnerabilities of Taipei’s offshore communications infrastructure. The ship is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company whose director is Chinese, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. An unidentified Taiwanese official cited in the report described the case as sabotage. The incident followed another Chinese vessel’s suspected involvement in the breakages of data cables in the Baltic Sea in November last year. While fishing trawlers are known to sometimes damage such equipment, nation states have also
RSS