ANALYSIS: A fully-subscriber funded model is the one we have chosen, and we need to adapt to challenges to protect our IP and grow the business, just as other successful companies do.
You’ll have seen the news by now: NBR is trying to stop corporates stealing from us.
As part of this, the publishers have secured settlements from three leading businesses for copyright breaches. These settlements set precedent for New Zealand businesses and the media industry. Each case would have otherwise been taken to court, but the settlements were for both parties the most pragmatic response.
It’s been a process to get to this stage, we tell you. Earlier this year, NBR began investigating several large businesses that appeared to be breaching NBR’s copyright and subscription terms and conditions by sharing small numbers of subscriptions widely among their staff.
Following those investigations, NBR last week secured settlements from two leading fund managers and one national law firm. Each firm paid legal costs and agreed to buy the appropriate number of subscriptions.
The exact terms of those settlements, including the names of the firms, is confidential.
But we can say that these three leading legal and financial firms pull in large amounts of revenue and profit each year. You can be darn sure they would be taking legal action against anyone stealing from them.
And we know they aren’t the only ones.
We value our member subscribers hugely, and know that most of you treat your subscription with respect and honesty. But for this crackdown on copyright to work properly, we’ve had to close up the gaps in our security in which they are able to occur. We’ve stopped the ability to copy and paste our content, or save to PDF, or print – all ways unscrupulous users were getting around our paywall if they wanted to share content with non-subscribers.
You may think this is overkill – perhaps it has interrupted how you like to read our news.
So why are we doing it? Frankly, to survive.
The NBR doesn’t accept advertising, sponsorship, or government funding. It is wholly subscriber funded. This means the only revenue it gets – to pay the salaries of our lean (but incredibly productive) team of award-winning journos, production staff, and an office manager – comes from subscription fees.
And while accepting advertising or sponsorship would pad the coffers more, we feel it compromises our independence. Not accepting this means subscribers do not have to worry about seeing stories on our site that are, for instance, completely made up for political or commercial reasons that look like news stories but turn out to be advertisements (a key concern of the NZ public, highlighted by the AUT research centre for Journalism, Media, and Democracy’s Trust in News report.)
A fully-subscriber funded model is the one we have chosen, and we need to adapt to challenges to protect our IP and grow the business, just as other successful companies do. Too many newsrooms in the past few years have had to lay off staff, or close their doors.
Even with this prompt, ChatGPT will not offer a method to bypass the paywall. It will suggest you take up a subscription.
Our team of journalists have won many awards between them, have a nose for news, demonstrate high journalistic integrity, and consistently put out top-quality work under time pressures. The NBR was ranked New Zealand’s most trusted business news publication, and the third-equal most trusted media outlet (in the aforementioned AUT report). We are transparent and open about how we gather news, and are happy to answer subscribers’ questions or requests for more information.
So, back to the changes on our site. Most feedback we’ve received has been positive but there’s also been some complaints – and we get it, there are some inconveniences for those who use certain functions and not to circumvent copyright. We’ll address some of that now.
Yes, this is a function that comms managers at various corporates also like – allowing them to hold one subscription and then copy and paste relevant NBR content into an email to senior managers. Unfortunately, this breaches our copyright and really, just rips us off.
The other, equally important, reason we turned this function off was to take a proactive approach for advancements in AI and copyright breaches. If our intellectual property – articles – are copy/pasted into AI tools, we lose control of that information. We've already seen hallucinations citing the NBR Rich List (see: Grok wrongly names NBR Rich Lister as man involved in child porn.) AI can also strip text out of PDFs – regardless of watermarks or ‘not for replication’ legal text written in the file.
Share buttons available at the top of the articles, and on the NBR App.
Instead, feel free to share NBR content by copy/pasting the article URL, or by using the share buttons for Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and email at the top of each article. These methods respect the NBR paywall, meaning subscribers can read the content, while non-subscribers will be prompted to subscribe before accessing the article. This helps drive both traffic and new subscribers.
To protect our articles from theft, they can no longer be saved to PDF or printed. This was also a feature comms managers loved – print off a copy of a relevant article, scan it or make copies for all the senior leaders – bingo, get around the need for more than one subscription. Well, this also gets around the need to pay for our content.
If you want to read an article later, hit the ‘save article’ button (underneath the article’s lead pic or video) and it will appear in ‘Your Saved Articles’ list at the top right of your screen, next to your account settings (or bottom of screen if using the NBR app).
If you liked to print so you could increase the font size, instead, you can increase that on the screen. If you use the NBR app, go to the settings menu, and switch the toggle to ‘Big font’. You can zoom in using your browser too (for example, through the three-dot dropdown menu on Google Chrome).
NBR was the first New Zealand media publication to put up a full paywall 16 years ago. Other publications have followed suit, in various measures. We know our competitors and colleagues in media are taking note of the steps NBR is now taking to stamp out copyright breaches, and potentially will also restrict the ability to copy/paste and print. Remember also, that these publications get a large chunk of their revenue from advertising and sponsorship deals – whereas NBR relies solely on subscriptions.
NBR’s publishers, Todd and Jackie Scott, are offering an amnesty until the end of November to allow managers the time to do the right thing by paying for the correct number of subscriptions for their team, and so remove themselves from the list of flagged companies and individuals that have been picked up by NBR’s new sophisticated system to combat copyright breaches.
We value our subscribers and are pleased and grateful that so many value the work we do to hold the powerful to account; investigate companies, individuals, and government departments; and write clear, informative, and engaging content.
So, corporate and government subscribers especially, this message is for you. Please check you have the correct number of subs for the people who are reading them. Pay honestly for the business news you use – or you might end up losing it altogether.
Calida Stuart-Menteath and Hamish McNicol are NBR’s co-editors.
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