Sun readers will have to pay £2 a month to access columns by star writers including Jeremy Clarkson, popular content such as from the agony aunt Dear Deidre and some exclusive stories and investigations, as the UK’s biggest tabloid launches a paid-for content strategy.
Called Sun Club and initially priced at £1.99 a month, it launches on Tuesday and comes a decade after the Sun scrapped a subscription strategy that put all of its content behind a paywall.
The new offering will require readers to pay for some of the Sun’s daily output, including exclusive video content such as from its Royal Exclusive programme. Other columns to go behind the new paywall include those by Rod Liddle, Loose Women’s Jane Moore and its political editor, Harry Cole.
Billed as a membership programme offering “no-holds-barred access to our first-rate content”, Sun Club also gives access to deals such as the long-running Holidays from £9.50 promotion. Previously that was only available to buyers of the print edition, or subscribers paying £6.99 a month for the digital edition of the paper through the app.
“The Sun has always offered readers more than a paper,” said its editor-in-chief, Victoria Newton. “Sun Club will help us expand our offer to audiences even further.”
Sun Club follows the launch of a registration wall that asks visitors to the site to sign up for free to read certain stories.
The publisher of the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday began a partial paywall strategy in January last year. Mail+, which charges £4.99 a month, includes about 10 to 15 articles a day offering content from some columnists and exclusives in sections such as entertainment, investigations and royal coverage.
Daily Mail and General Trust, which last week announced cuts affecting as many as 99 UK editorial staff, said Mail+ had passed 100,000 subscribers in November last year.
The Sun’s main website has been free to access since December 2015 when it scrapped its hard paywall after two years. While the £2-a-week digital Sun+ service had attracted about 200,000 paying subscribers, the tabloid found it meant it lost too much readership overall to free rivals such as MailOnline and the Mirror.
The Sun’s first drive into paid-for content launched on 1 August 2013 and included access to Premier League football highlights, a deal struck by the then chief executive, Mike Darcey, who had previously been a senior executive at BSkyB. At the time Darcey had said it was “untenable” for the Sun not to start charging for online content.
News UK, the owner of the Sun, had been emboldened by promising signs after it put its Times and Sunday Times titles behind a paywall in 2010. That strategy has proved financially successful, despite the papers losing 90% of their digital traffic to other sites in the months after launch.
