The Bulldog To Erect Low-Cost Paywall

For the price of a good cup of coffee at the corner shop, you can get a month of The Bulldog.

After 13 years of publishing the free Bulldog, we will be charging $5 a month for Ottawa’s largest independent news website.

We erect this paywall with reluctance but with current economic uncertainty, new funding formulas by ad networks and the explosion of websites created by artificial intelligence, the market for advertising has cratered leaving this publication no choice but to charge readers a small subscription fee for the service. The Bulldog is supported primarily by digital ad networks.

Our costs to produce the website are substantial but mostly result from insurance and web-hosting. Neither of these costs are getting cheaper. And we would like to get improved website hosting to better serve our growing and involved readership.

The price of a cup of coffee and a tip for a month of this publication is likely within the budget of most Bulldog readers and we have kept the cost as low as possible. No one is looking to get rich publishing The Bulldog but we think it provides a valuable service during the worst journalism financial crisis in history. We look forward to your support for Ottawa local independent journalism.

All readers will have access to three free posts a month while pages such as Full Local, Breaking News and Ottawa’s most comprehensive weather forecast will still be free.

Next week The Bulldog will continue to publish but you might see some odd configurations as the paywall is constructed. Hopefully the paywall will begin operating sometime during the upcoming week.

We hope you find The Bulldog useful and a crucial part of this community.

We thank you in advance for your patronage.

Ken Gray, Editor