I subscribe to the online version of the Shanghai Daily, an English language newspaper that is a lot more interesting to read than the China Daily. I used to read the China Daily in Beijing because there was nothing better available, but since I moved to Shanghai I have not touched it again, except when I get one on an Air China plane. I actually did not read the online Shanghai Daily that often, because the format was hard to read on a computer screen. I hoped they would change to a different way of presenting the paper, and this morning my wish was fulfilled! The Shanghai Daily now has a decent website, that is free to browse and a searchable archive that goes back at least until early 2003.
The site even has RSS feeds for all kinds of news (metro, national, headlines etc.), and explains to the readers what RSS is. They also explain what a podcast is, although I could not find any podcasts on their site yet. So maybe they will start with this soon as well. Or they just copy/pasted the RSS description from another site and by mistake also copied the podcast part? The editor even has his own blog and there is a blog for all Shanghai events (both powered by WordPress).
Anther interesting feature is the listings of all bars, restaurants and hotels in the city. A quick check of the bars (217 in total) revealed that all my favorites are in there, so it seems they did a decent job.
And how do they make money from this? It seems likely that many subscribers will not continue their subscription. The only added value is downloading a pdf version of the current newspaper, that it hard to read. But they (intentionally?) put Google Ads on all their pages, maybe that will compensate the loss in online subscriptions a bit.