Most pay walls will be temporary in 2010, says ratings firm

Pay walls may be erected, only to be mostly dismantled, next year in most U.S. print media, according to a new forecast from global credit ratings firm Fitch Ratings, reported in AdAge.

Media companies with print products will erect and then dismantle online pay walls next year. With exceptions like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, small local papers with limited competition and business-to-business magazines, Fitch said, most publishers face too much competition to get consumers to pay on the web. Some publishers have already decided not to focus on pay walls, despite a crescendo of attention to the idea this year, but many others remain committed to trying some form of pay scheme.

Fitch also says that the recovery from recession won't necessarily lift all media alike. TV and cable will benefit most, but

"Fitch expects print mediums, namely newspapers, yellow pages and consumer magazines, to be down again off very easy comparable periods due to permanent shifts in advertiser sentiment and excess ad inventory that will plague the industry for years to come," it wrote in the forecast.