Thank heavens for news subscribers, you might say… they pay up in such delightful ways.

A year down the line from the introduction of its “porous” paywall, Fairfax Media is still learning about its online subscribers.

When they go on holiday, they might stop the paper but they go on paying for the digital access they had received “free”. And it turns out they could be a market for downloads and even premium content.

Editor-in-chief of The Age Andrew Holden says the Australian publisher is looking at options for exclusive and premium content. It recently announced a new recruit to head data gathering, but admits it still wants to know more about the print subscribers who go online, a data challenge it expects will take a while to crack.

The July 2013 introduction of a porous paywall for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald has been a standout success, scoring 140,000 paid subscribers and $18 million in its first year, substantially ahead of the combined target 90,000 and $11 million.

But it wants more: Holden says the plan is to recruit a further 100,000 paying digital readers, an “ambitious” target he says will still not be enough to pay for its quality journalism and lost print revenue. “We are under no illusion about that,” he says.

One plan for the group is to more than treble the take from events such as Sydney’s City-to-Surf – which it owns outright – and presumably regional agricultural shows and the Tamworth music festival’s Starmaker quest, taking revenue from $30 million to $100 million.

Talking about the paywall plan codenamed Project China at the WAN-Ifra India conference this week, Holden declared the company pleased with an outcome which has drawn bonus revenue without toppling it from the ‘most popular news website’ pedestal.

In fact Emma ‘stripped’ aggregate (print and digital) figures would put the Sydney Morning Herald audience ahead of News Corp rival the Daily Telegraph on online alone, before mobile and tablet are added (making 5.4 million).

News events – such as the federal election and a record-breaking 1.7 million audience following the death of actor Robin Williams – have helped buoy readership. That’s the “now” success, for which Holden quotes a current 980,488 uniques in Delhi, and shows a 13-month chart from August 2013, a month after introduction of the paywall. What was July like? No-one asks.

But he admits that, seeing no advantage in being the paywall first mover, “it certainly helped” that News Corp Australia went first. And that churn remains a problem – at 30 per cent against the 21 per cent of print – eased by replacing a “$1 for first month” offer for which “the jump was too great”, with one of 50 per cent off the first three months.

Ifra India delegates – including one from the Hindustan Times and another from VG in Norway – do however, ask why print subscribers got digital access free (mostly to ensure they didn’t feel shortchanged) and whether it was avoiding the market pressure that caused a slowdown at the New York Times. “We’ve got more than enough competition,” Holden says, “and if we get another 100,000 we’ll be more than delighted.”

The objective was only ever to charge the 20 per cent “heavy” users, without alienating casual users or frustrating social media links. It’s currently staying with the “30 articles a month” meter limit, with access to the mobile app limited. The paywall is typically suspended “as a public service” during events such as the NSW bushfires.

So in this “digital first” world, who gets the news first? In the belief that “the opposition will redesign their paper and pretend our story was their own,” Fairfax gets canny with stories it’s “absolutely certain” it has to itself.

Releasing a story in the morning is a marketing ploy which will help it lead the agenda through the day. “Then it will be our story being talked about,” Holden says. “It’s a very deliberate strategy about holding back so we dominate a story.”

Everyone’s a competitor these days, he says, even the owners of the Aussie Rules football code… which has a staff of 100 journalists.

At the same time as pushing for digital subs, Fairfax has pushed up the cost of print subscriptions – although digital subscribers get the weekend papers free – cutting out the “free delivery” offers which made home-delivered sales worth much less than shop sales. The result has been an 11.4 per cent increase in print circulation revenue.

Some 110,000 print subscribers have taken up the “free digital” offer and Holden says like their digital counterparts, they are more engaged reading seven times more pages than non-subscribers. The Age, for example, has a six-minute engagement, a top achievement Holden admits, may be hard to keep.

The “hard” paywall of Fairfax national daily the Australian Financial Review will also switch to premium price shortly, “more open with some free stories”.

Although a print reader had been valued at seven or eight times what a digital reader, this had been redressed by digital subscriptions: “The value is the same when you consider that they don’t have the same costs… even though there’s more advertising in a print newspaper,” he says.

Peter Coleman