Photo by @JohnKelly

At this point, the message on the launch screens of The Washington Post’s iPhone and iPad apps are kind of a running joke: “Enjoy this complimentary subscription for a limited time.”

Since the advent of online journalism, the Post has been giving it away for free, and even though more and more newspapers are putting their content behind paywalls, the folks at 15th and L are still providing unlimited news, totally free of charge.

Don Graham, the chairman of The Washington Post Company, has said for a while that he is considering the possibility of making 15th and L an online gated community. Not that that has advanced the establishment of a paywall at all. Graham has flat-out said that he thinks the model used by The New York Times, which sells stand-alone digital subscriptions in addition to packaging web and mobile access to print subscriptions, would not work for the Post.

At a conference of media investors in New York yesterday, Graham hinted the Post might be inching toward finally charging its online readers. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reports that Graham is still looking for the right formula.

“We will continue to study it and see if we can find [a digital pay structure] that fits,” Graham said.

But Graham might not want to keep waiting. Shortly after the ouster of Post editor Marcus Brauchli, Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review suggested the Post raise the paywall straight away. Why? Not only have print advertising rates long been a shell of what they once were, digital sales rates are on the decline, too. Charging for access has helped other papers offset those losses:

The benefits of adding a paywall are becoming more apparent by the day even as fears of a downside are receding. The FT, the Times and other premium papers—and I assume that’s what the Post management thinks it is, right?—have shown traffic and digital ad losses to be more than manageable. Indeed, the FT says it can charge considerably higher ad rates than free sites. It has gone truly “digital first” in the sense that digital revenue is now eclipsing print revenue, and not because of print declines but because of digital growth. That may be why paywalls are being adopted all over the world, and papers like the Post find themselves living on an increasingly lonely, little FONtasy Island. And the tide is still coming in.

Though in his continued hedging away from the Times’ paywall, Graham pointed out that while the Gray Lady is printed all over the country, the Post isn’t available outside the mid-Atlantic, Edmonds reports.

But Graham also said that 90 percent of the Post’s online audience visits from outside the D.C. metropolitan area, and he is hesitant to endanger the digital ads generated by those readers. But it’s not like washingtonpost.com is so unpopular. The web traffic-ranking site Alexa reports that the Post’s website is the 78th most popular of any site in the United States, and the 15th most popular news site in the world.

The Times, another news organization with a lot of web-only readers from around the world, is the fourth biggest news site, even after it began demanding visitors cough up some dough after viewing 20 articles per month.

But at least for the sake of the employees at 15th and L, Graham is getting there, albeit slowly. Maybe.