By NYU Staff

The Green Bay Packers garner worldwide appeal. There’s the glory days of Vince Lombardi.  The charm of a publicly-owned team. In fact, the team’s appeal is so large and fan base so wide, if you write about the Packers, you might even charge for your content.

“At this point there are only a few niches that you can charge for, and the Packers are one of them,” says Mike Davis, editor of JSonline.com. 

And so it is with Packer Insider. Founded in 2001, the subscription-based blog takes up a piece of Milwaukee, Wisc.’s Journal Sentinel’s Packer coverage. But instead of reading one of JSOnline.com’s news or feature stories for free, Packer Insider members pay $6.95 a month (or $44.95 a year) to binge on analysis and commentary as well as bi-weekly online chats with beat reporters, some of whom have been covering the Packers for decades. (The paper won’t say exactly how many subscribe, only that it’s “in the thousands.”)

And so it seems a media Web site has found the solution to all its problems: how to get readers to pay for content. Finding those readers that will pay – and the coverage they will pay for – has proven tricky. As the industry looks for this equilibrium, it’s apparent that it has to be niche and premium content.

At that rate, Packer Insider could be one the lucky sites that realize early on that sports, like financial markets, are an area in which specialized information can be monetized, says Jon Fine, former media columnist for BusinessWeek. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, is one of the only papers that still charges for content online.

“I used to attribute this to the fact that rabid sports fans are, generally, completely fucking insane, and especially completely fucking insane about hoovering up any scrap of new information concerning their particular obsession,” he says.

But even though Packer Insider can charge viewers, it still grapples with the precarious nature of news content.

“Maybe if we put more behind the wall, we’d get more subscribers, but we have to manage how much we keep behind the wall and how many page views we want for advertising,” says Davis. He adds: that’s something all media organizations will tackle as they look for new means of revenue.