Witness the turn around the New York Times is enjoying with its paywall-driven growth in online subscriptions.
The jury's still out on The Times and Sunday Times, which are offering low-priced packages to help a migration to online subscriptions.
The boldest conglomerate is News Corporation, which sells online subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal and will begin charging for the newspaper's smart-phone applications.
Various combinations of apps and online subscriptions are in the works.
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The company said that online and cable-television subscriptions had grown strongly.
Disney recently began selling subscriptions to its large online library of children's books.
The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Economist are among the publishers that use their own billing systems to sell bundled subscriptions across print, online and digital devices.
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The top-performing online product categories were digital content and subscriptions, event tickets, jewelry and watches, consumer electronics (excl. computer peripherals) and computer software.
For their part, cable companies fear that people will become so accustomed to getting television and films online that they will drop their video subscriptions.
In the fall it will release new and spruced-up features on the Microsoft Network, the number two online service (with 8 million paying subscriptions to AOL's 34 million).
Factors contributing to its cyclical and greatly exaggerated demise include rampant mobile game growth and declining subscriptions for MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) titles.
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Some public-interest groups have alleged that such paywalls discourage people from dumping their cable subscriptions and buying channels like ESPN individually online.
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Unlike print publishers (who have several ancillary sources of revenue, including subscriptions and newsstands), in the online world most publications completely depend on ad revenue.
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The Adobe Media Player, which will become available later this year, will use RSS subscriptions to store and play automatically updated online video on your desktop, as well as streaming videos from the Web.
Authentication has been embraced by many players in the TV industry as a way to head off the possibility that consumers could begin dropping their cable and satellite TV subscriptions in favor of lower-cost online video services, such as Netflix Inc.
Tepid online presence: Conde Nast sites used mainly to sell subscriptions.
To sell subscriptions that bundle the Times in print, online and on mobile devices, the Times has had to develop an e-commerce platform that patches together various old and new databases and programs.
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It intends to become the leading wholesaler for online music, licensing its service to other firms seeking to sell subscriptions, and leaving the packaging and pricing to them.
Subscriptions to rental services such as GameFly or codes for online game portals such as WildTangent also offer good value, allowing friends and family to play hundreds of titles for less than the price of one.
The largest drop on the list belonged to Newsday, whose owners, Cablevision, last year implemented an unforgiving online pay wall in the hopes that such a move would help them to sell bundled newspaper and cable service subscriptions.
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