Alibaba Removs The Paywall From SCMP

The online and mobile versions of SCMP will no longer have a paywall.

Late last year, it was reported that the Chinese tech giant Alibaba Group Holding has agreed a $266 million deal to acquire Hong Kong’s leading English language newspaper South China Morning Post. The move came in as the company was looking to strengthen its media division. Many questions were raised by the analysts over the independence of editors etc. during the time of acquisition. But Alibaba managed to handle all of it quite well. And being one of the products of its media division, SCMP has been doing well in the market.

The Wall Street Journal now reported that Alibaba Group has decided to scrap the subscriber pay wall. This is one of the first moves of Alibaba as the owner of the newspaper South China Morning Post. The removal of the pay wall is done from the online and mobile versions of the news paper in order to emphasize more on generating traffic. Alibaba is not the first one to scrap the pay wall around its content but many media companies are doing it as well.

The Chinese tech giant previously said that it will do any and everything to preserve its independence and rights under the new leadership of Alibaba. However, the move was depicted as to satisfy the needs and appetite for more diversified news of China by providing free online content. The editor in chief of South China Morning Post, Tammy Tam, said in a statement when the acquisition was completed “A global community of China stakeholders will demand insightful and trusted news and commentaries from a within-the-region perspective.”

It was believed that Alibaba’s acquisition also meant to improve and strengthen its presence of online e-commerce market amongst the masses. Analysts reported that the Chinese e-commerce leader desires to use its assets from the media division that would help in boosting ads and bring more traffic on its e-commerce marketplaces along with improving its entertainment presence.

It is known that the SCMP.com currently has more than 2.5 million users on board that are using its online or mobile versions. The figure was disclosed by the company itself when it officially announced the removal of pay wall.

Alibaba’s acquisitions of media assets did not only limit to South China Morning Post but it succeeded in acquiring the Hong Kong versions of Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Esquire. Analysts believe that these moves would help the company in bringing in more high end consumers to its marketplaces. The SCMP Group Ltd. will soon be renamed to Armada Holdings Ltd. as a listing company.

According to Muzhi Li, who is an Arete Research Asia Ltd.’s analyst, he said “If you cannot access content, you cannot see ads. This move is all about driving traffic and helping sellers close more transactions.”

The revenue of SCMP Group for the year 2014 was $159.9 million (HK$ 1.24 billion) where its owner Alibaba’s revenue for the last fiscal year which ended March 2015 was $12.3 billion.