For the first time since introducing digital subscriptions more than a decade ago, The Australian will lift its paywall – giving readers free access to its journalism for a limited time this weekend.
The rare move, which temporarily opens the national broadsheet’s entire digital archive and daily reporting to the public, comes as the masthead looks to convert growing audience curiosity into long-term subscribers.
“We’ve had really strong readership growth over the last 12 months in print and digital, we’re up 5%, there’s lots of people who are aware of our content, considering our content and we just felt that it was time to give them the opportunity to you know, sample it in detail,” Nicholas Gray, Managing Director and Publisher of The Australian told Mediaweek.
“So, this weekend we’re dropping the whole paywall, new content and archive, and it’s the first time since our paywall launched in 2011 that everything’s freely available to anyone.”
The initiative marks the first time the publication has opened its digital gates since launching its paid model in October 2011, when The Australian became the first general newspaper in Australia to introduce a digital subscription strategy.
Learning from global mastheads
The concept itself, Gray said, draws directly from experiments run by News Corp’s international titles.
He noted similar short-term paywall lifts have previously been trialled by The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal, giving prospective subscribers the chance to explore premium journalism before committing.
“I’d love to take credit for it as an original idea, but our colleagues at the Times of London have done it a few times,” Gray said, explaining that the local team drew on those examples when bringing the tactic to Australia.
“We’re really lucky to have colleagues at the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London from whom we can learn, and they’ve done it a few times with some success, and so we’ve brought it to Australia.”
For the promotion, readers will be able to access the full breadth of the publication’s journalism – spanning politics, business, culture, global affairs and lifestyle – without hitting the subscription barrier.
Turning curiosity into subscriptions
Behind the free-access weekend sits a clear commercial objective: attract new readers, then convert them.
Gray expects a noticeable spike in traffic from readers who would normally sit behind the paywall.
“We expect there to be an uplift in non-subscribers reading our content over the course of the weekend, and we expect a meaningful uplift,” he said.
“There’s obviously a huge news cycle at the moment, so we hadn’t planned it. We hadn’t planned it to be two weeks after the really unfortunate events in Iran, but given there’s a huge news agenda at the moment, we’ve got an engaged audience, so we expect our anonymous non-subscriber page to be up significantly.”
Once the promotional window closes, The Australian will follow up with a targeted digital subscription offer to convert those new readers.
Gray said the longer-term goal is simple: increase subscriber numbers and grow digital revenue.
“Our mantra is pay and stay,” he said.
“We want more Australian consumers, and once they start with us, we want them to stay with us, and so the short-term objective is more traffic and the longer-term objective is more subscribers and more digital revenue growth.”
Why paid journalism still matters
Despite opening access for the weekend, Gray made clear the masthead remains firmly committed to a paid model.
He argues subscriptions are now a fundamental pillar of the modern news business – alongside advertising and licensing revenue from technology platforms.
“There are two sets of benefits, right?” Grey said.
“There’s to the consumers who pay, they get access to exclusive high-quality content, whether it’s politics, business, culture, wealth, health and then there’s a broader point which is in a digital world, digital subscriptions are a really key part of the economic model along with advertising and content licensing from the tech platforms.”
Without that model, he says, maintaining high-quality journalism at scale would be far harder.
“I will say, though, as a company, we’re also committed to making sure that all Australians have access to news media,” he added, pointing to news.com.au as the country’s largest free commercial news brand.
“We recognise the importance of all Australians being able to access news media, but we certainly don’t apologise for having a paywall for The Australian.”
More than just a news product
While the masthead is synonymous with politics and business reporting, Gray said its broader lifestyle and cultural coverage – particularly on weekends – plays a major role in audience growth.
“The Weekend Australian, it’s our biggest readership product in print, it’s up year on year in print, and one of the reasons is the breadth as well as the depth,” he said.
The weekend edition combines news analysis with sections dedicated to culture, travel, luxury, sport and property.
“You’ve got business, you’ve got sport, you’ve got property, and The Weekend Australian is a compelling proposition in print and digital, both because it sums up the week and it also goes deeply into those other coverage areas.”
A national masthead with growing reach
The weekend activation comes as The Australian continues to expand its overall audience footprint.
According to the latest readership figures, the publication now reaches more than 4.9 million Australians each month across print and digital – representing a 5 per cent year-on-year increase.
That scale reinforces the masthead’s position as the country’s most-read national newspaper across platforms and underscores its strategic importance within News Corp Australia’s publishing portfolio.
For News Corp, the temporary removal of the paywall offers a rare opportunity: let readers roam freely through the product – and hope enough of them decide it’s worth paying for once the gates close again.