Yesterday leading mobile blog Mobile Industry Review announced it is to stop providing it’s content for free to readers and instead charge for access.

One company has bought our entire output exclusively, on-going. We are, in effect, becoming a private research company.

Our new client is unwilling to subsidise our existing audience of readers (300-400k last month) so the content that we’ll be creating — reports, video interviews and day-to-day industry news and analysis — will become proprietary from 27th of March. After this date, the public version of MIR will no longer be updated.

Previously the MIR blog has been ad supported. Switching to only allowing corporate subscribers for the fee of £12,000 pa marks a radical change in business model. Fundamentally the the aim of gathering news and researching the industry remains the same.

It is interesting to see the contrast between MIR becoming more closed with a much smaller reach and the attempt of papers such as The Guardian and NY Times to reach a larger audience through open APIs.