The Cricketer and pay-per-view articles: A letter to our readers from the digital editor

We understand that a monthly digital subscription is not attractive to everyone, so we have teamed up with Agate - an easy-to-use digital wallet provider - to open our magazine up to the online world on a pay-per-view basis

Dear readers,

Over the past few weeks you may have wondered what the little green box is floating in the top left corner of your screen when you visit thecricketer.com. Today, I’m delighted to explain all.

From January 21, The Cricketer will be publishing more high-quality cricket content online than ever before.

In addition to the abundance of features, comment, opinion and breaking news we currently run, a large number of articles from the print edition of the world’s best cricket magazine will start to make their way onto the website as we look to make top-class writing about the best game on the planet quickly and immediately accessible to everyone.

We realise there is a generation of cricket fans out there who are not naturally inclined to pay for monthly magazine subscriptions, cannot afford the regular fees or who would prefer to pick and choose the content they consume from a variety of outlets - much like they would on the internet.

Furthermore, in a year when the ECB is actively trying to grow cricket among young people and in communities which before it might not have reached, we recognise the importance of making the insight regularly found in our magazine easily discoverable.

So to our solution.

Asking people to pay for journalism in the digital world has historically been riddled with problems; the industry has been trying to figure out a successful and popular model for more than 15 years.

We understand that a monthly digital subscription is not attractive to everyone, so we have teamed up with Agate - an easy-to-use digital wallet provider - to open our magazine up to the online world on a pay-per-view basis.

From today, some articles on thecricketer.com - features, profiles, comment and opinion from within the magazine, none of which had previously been made available online - will be accessible for the modest sum of 30p each.

All you need to do is set up a wallet with Agate, by clicking on the green tab in the top left corner of your screen, and follow the instructions.

For a full set of FAQs about the process, please click here.

It will remain better value for money to take out a subscription of the magazine, while our existing online output will remain the same and will not incur a charge (we have grand plans for 2019, too, including the addition of new columnists, county content on tap and wall-to-wall coverage of the World Cup and Ashes).

Furthermore, those with existing digital subscriptions to the magazine do not have to pay a penny. All you need to do is register your details with Agate, and you will gain unfettered access to everything on the website.

However, for those just discovering The Cricketer, or cricket for that matter, this offers the chance to sample before you buy.

thecricketer.com has enjoyed enormous digital growth in the past 12 months, with visitor numbers to our website up by almost 300 per cent in 2018, and we are convinced that there is a massive appetite among the public for more high-calibre writing, entertaining opinion, thought-provoking analysis and forensic research.

That cannot always come for free.

We believe that the pay-per-view option gives us a great opportunity to satisfy the demands of readers of all ages, all the while standing by the principle that our journalists’, editors’, photographers’ and columnists’ work should not be given away for nothing.

We hope you do too and, to get you started, we will double everyone's first top-ups until February 28.

Thank you all for reading, and here’s to a bright future for both the game of cricket and the world of digital publishing.

Best wishes,

Sam Morshead

Digital Editor, The Cricketer

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