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Murdoch's UK Paywall a Miserable Failure
David Gerard writes "As part of his war against free, Rupert Murdoch put the Times and Sunday Times of London behind a paywall. Michael Wolff of Newser asks how that's working out for him. You can guess: miserable failure: 'Not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself — who have free access to the site — are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.' Not that this wasn't entirely predictable." Update: 07/17 01:41 GMT by T : Frequent contributor Peter Wayner writes skeptically that the Newsday numbers should be looked at with a grain of salt: "I believe they were charging $30/month for the electronic edition and $25/month for the dead tree edition which also offered free access to the electronic edition. In essence, you had to pay an extra $5 to avoid getting your lawn littered with paper. The dead tree edition gets much better ad rates and so it is worth pushing. It's a mistake to see the raw numbers and assume that the paywall failed."
As much as I would love to see this fail, it's still early days in this projects inception, and I don't think they were expecting it to massively take off anyway. The paywall proper has only been in effect a few weeks, maybe better marketing and a better price point (I think £1 a day is too much for digitally delivered content, especially if the actual print edition is the same price!).
An interesting piece by David Mitchell at the Guardian as to why he would like to see this succeed is worth a read.
jaymz
Not every time - The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times & Economist (same company) are a couple that worked. I can't think of anymore that worked though. And it is interesting the subject matter of those three papers. There must be a couple of more exceptions.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The Times / Sunday Times used to have a paid archive on CD-ROM circa 1992. On the internet, there were no articles over about a week old IIRC, the articles went into those CD-ROM archives. There was no great demand for that either, so the whole concept of charging got ditched and they got advertisers to relaunch a free expanded website.
I wonder that now that it's a paid for website, how the advertisers feel about the massive drop in people being able to view their ads (assuming you're not crunching the ads with plug-ins for the likes of Firefox).
Take Nobody's Word For It.
If it costs to read news, people go to competitor's website. But even if all the major news sources began doing that, they wouldn't get the subscribers they want. There would be a few bloggers who would subscribe and post (even) more dramatic, (even) more provocative and (even) less accurate descriptions of the events and people would read those blogs. If the subcribtion costs would skyrocket, even the bloggers wouldn't subscribe.
I think that the best shot for traditional news media is to take advantage this: People want to pay for what they appreciate. I wouldn't want to buy an expensive subscribe to a magazine from which I read one or two articles a day on most days. But let's say that each article had "Thanks" button that costs 15 cents to click? I think I would click that pretty often. (Perhaps a drop down menu to donate even larger sums to some articles) Add some "20 cents to comment" cost and - if it rocks your boat - a bit of social media like qualities so you can see what articles your friends, favorite politicians, etc. saw as worth supporting.
For the Economist, I (as a subscriber) can tell you why it worked for their subscribers: they offer fantastic value. I sing the praise for the Economist whenever I can, because I think that they are one of the few companies that get it. With my paper subscription I get:
1. Full access to the website including ALL past issues!
2. The current issue as an audio podcast (800MB!).
3. I can cancel my subscription whenever I want AND GET THE REMAINING MONEY BACK! (This is a big YES THEY GOT HOW TO TREAT THEIR CUSTOMERS.)
4. If there are problems with deliveries (e.g. a UK postal strike), they switched to hand deliveries to make sure the subscribers got their issues.
These are all added-value services that ensure I will subscribe to their magazine even though I manage to read it only occasional due to the volume of articles. Obviously, I also believe their articles are top-notch (they even get technology reasonably well).
I am not affiliated with the Economist in any way. Just a very happy customer.
A pretty sizable chunk of scientific and other academic journals have operated reasonably successful paywalls(though their cases probably differ a bit because their main market is University/Institutional libraries and negotiating site licenses with the same. Their paywalls don't actually need to rack up many, if any, individual subscribers, they just have to make the prospect of using the journal without an institutional subscription, or a compelling need, so ridiculous that the institution caves and buys a site license).
On the other hand, they've drawn some fairly massive flack over the issue, so, if the open access guys get their way, it could end up costing them rather badly in the long run.
Wow, yeah. That's a great example of customer service adding value to a product.
It also helps that the Economist tends to have quality and unique content. It's something you can find from 5000 other sources at the same time, as opposed to your average newspaper.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If its one thing I've learned in a few years of being involved in the journalistic trade...it's that so many people in it are pigheaded to the point of doing themselves a lot of damage to their potential success and reputation. This is true from editors, to rank and file columnists...and new graduates convert alarmingly to this mentality with a dissapointing number of exceptions.
Murdoch aside, the overriding truth of modern journalist both here in the UK and in the US is that quantity rules over quality. That's why every Saturday and Sunday we Britons cannot buy a 'quality broadsheet' without having to acquire a book's worth of text in supplements along with the actual newspaper itself. That one has to shell over £1.20 or so for a compendium of tripe that you mostly won't get around to reading is why journalism is failing.
Simply put there are too many people employed who may have begun with some talent, but have lapsed into a state of passive drudgery writing filler columns about inane topics most readers could not care less about. You can actually tell with a lot of them that the author wasn't really thinking as he or she typed it out. In short the 'news' of newspaper is absent in a woefully high proportion; yes there's room for editorials and quirky opinion pieces...but the proportions are way off right now.
This is true of all Murdoch rags, most starkly The Times which was a pioneer of supplements in the 1990s. Once, decades ago (pre-Murdoch), the Times led some of the most intriguing investigative departments in journalistic history - they spent months to break a story that would spread across what? Four pages or so of print? This level of work for that amount of journalism is unheard of today - that's because today it's all about cheap, easy stories that can be summed up mostly as: 'Churnalism' (a term coined by Guardian journo Nick Davies) . It began in earnest in the 1980s with Andrew Neil's Times, and the trend away from reportage which took effort, talent, dedication and downright brilliance to pull off is almost entirely absent in The Times of 2010.
There is hope for the profession, as wracked by disease as it is; online journalism has some good offerings where journalists actually leave the office and do some old school reporting. That Murdoch and a few others see their awful, soulless content as worthy of paying for online rather than just going for what's worked since the beginning (advertisements) is telling of their wrongheaded approach which led so many publications to become so degraded in quality.
in charge of the movie, music, television, book, and print media industries, you have these guys who clawed their way to the top in an era of typewriters and cassette tapes and celluloid and NTSC and stopping the presses. the golden age of media
which the internet has killed
but these guys have invested decades of their lives in a status quo which went **POOF**, just when they get the point where they are at the helm
naturally, they are bitter. they've been screwed by history. they call it disruptive technology for a reason
so the rest of us will have to suffer awhile while these media dinosaurs hem and haw and throw chairs and grow purple faced and otherwise rage against the dying if the light. and then they're dead, and then those working in the media trenches now with a firm grasp of what the internet actually means will finally move into power, and maybe we can put all of this clashing of the eras behind us, and all these absolutely moronic laws and policies we keep making fun of here on slashdot, for good reason
one can hope, anyways
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I stopped paying the license fee over the BBC's decision to use DRM for its online offerings. I hadn't had a TV for about a year at that point, but I thought that the license fee was worth the money to support news.bbc.co.uk - it worked out cheaper than a daily newspaper, and the content is generally better. I still do, but I don't want any of my money going to fund DRM, so I'm not paying the fee (and, because I only watch TV shows after they are broadcast, on iPlayer or on DVD, I'm not legally required to). If they ditch the DRM on iPlayer, I'll start paying it again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm also wondering what people would consider something they'd pay for. For me, a physical paper is not about the convenience (lugging a folded wad of paper with me is not convenient), it's about the ritual in the morning. But I'm only willing to go through that ritual, the act of sitting down with a paper and a cup of coffee, on mornings where I can enjoy it.
:)
So, is the other side, the electronic side, something we'd pay for if it had a difference convenience factor? Are people less included to subscribe to whole electronic papers, but perhaps more inclined to pay for specific columnists, photographers, or sections of papers? For example, as someone who lives in Eastern Canada, I'm not really interested in the fact that the Globe and Mail does restaurant reviews of places in Toronto. But, if there was customizable content, maybe I'd pay for that instead.
Then again, I can get decent local coverage via the CBC's New Brunswick section, and that's free.
Like the parent, I agree that journalists and photographers need to get paid by someone. But even if you lived off of freely submitted content, you'd have to pay to maintain the infrastructure for your electronic version. As a FOSS developer, I'd love to be able to ask my grocery store to let me eat for free because I give away what I do
I agree. My home newspaper, the StarTribune in Minneapolis, started printing AP feeds directly years ago. I assume most papers today also print stories from "the wire" without any editing whatsoever. As Tridus implies, why would I pay fr something I can find somewhere else, probably for free.
Murdoch's not stupid, even if he does want to fight the tide. The question is, does he genuinely want to get money from this venture or does he want a "failure" to demonstrate the need for the government (who are indebted to him for supporting them in the election and stabbing the previous governing party in the back) to lend him a hand. I think it's quite reasonable to assume that he was advised that this would be a commercial failure and decided, eyes open, that that was exactly what he wanted to advance his lobbying position.
=======
I do not often visit The Times web site, I prefer the paper version. I do mainly if I want to share an article with a friend or few, some item of common interest. Something that has the side effect of introducing non Times readers to The Times.
I notice that I can no longer do that, it will cost me & my friends to be able to share such things. As a result, after 35 years, I will change newspaper; I will no longer buy your paper copy - probably going for the Guardian or Independent.
This paywall is a bad idea, the only way that I can adapt to it is to change which newspaper I read. Your foolish action will cost you. I give you permission to email me (once) when you reverse this policy; however I expect that, by then, I will be happy with my new newspaper.
Regards
=======
Bah, by British brother in law soldered shut the antenna plug on his TV a while back, to save some license money when he wasn't using it.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
The web site at newser.com call in at least 21 other sites according to No_Script and Ghostery shows at least 5 trackers as well.
I am a subscriber to the Times Literary Supplement. This year, I paid the supplementary 20$ to get Internet access, since I live in Canada and get the TLS with a substantial delay, and also because I was just curious given the scale of Murdoch's experiment, not talking about the scale of his pretensions.
So I am one of the very few who got past the registration page. The other side of this pay-wall allows us a peek on the dystopian nightmare that would have been the Internet if developed by corporations, and it is on a par with the current state of academic journals online. In order to undo what the Internet is meant to do, that is to hyperlink, Murdoch has spent a fortune developing a shiny interface that let us navigate through an exact reproduction of the paper thing. It is DRM by design: there is no way to copy and paste, to store, therefore to link, to annotate or to use in any meaningful sense of the word beyond a reading experience that is, as a result, as uncomfortable as it gets. The technical constraints that all this restraining impose make navigating and reading impractical and painful.
Despite the attractiveness of reading the TLS in a timely manner, I went to the site once and never repeated the experience.
As much as I love it when a billionaire faceplants, I would suggest that free-forever is not a sustainable business model either - lest those who produce the content are given free food, clothing and shelter.
Edison tried 3,000 times before he got it down, my guess is that Murdoch and his team are no less determined. One good thing to remember is that the more money he earns, the more money you could potentially earn.
Hope is the currency of fools
The flaw in Murdoch's strategy is that to effectively charge for something that everyone else is giving away for free, you need to convince all the other "free guys" to charge for their stuff.
This works in industries where the barriers to entry are high, but on the web, anyone can be a journalist - hell, you don't even need to know how to operate a web server any more - all you need is a hosted wordpress account and you are off to the races.
That's where Murdoch will focus his energies next - raising the barriers to entry. I can easily see this slimeball "partnering" with ISPs to restrict access to free sites. Unless we have clear regulator enforced net neutrality laws, Murdoch and his types will restrict our right to free press and force all of us to pay for his "news".
-ted
News has a model of the world in which you buy and read one paper, as you did back in the days when there were only paper editions. The reason you only bought one paper is that as papers rose in price, it got too expensive to buy all of them. So back then, unless you were a business person who really needed them all, you would buy one and read it. However when papers went online, all of a sudden people started reading the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent and Times, all of them.
Total newspaper readership therefore rose dramatically. The model had changed. We were now in a world of non-exclusive newspaper readership, where people find it natural to glance through all the broadsheets.
Rupert would now like to turn back the clock, and have all papers go behind the paywall. However, he fails to realize that if that world were to come about, total readership would fall. He would then only have those people who were prepared to restrict themselves to the Times.
It is not that people particularly want to get their content free. They will pay for it, if its distinctive and of value to them, as the FT, Economist, and WSJ show. What they do not want however is a model in which they subscribe to a paper as in the old days. So what happened when the Times went behind the paywall is that everyone deleted that bookmark but carried on as before reading Telegraph, Guardian and Independent. They don't really need the Times, as long as the market is using the model of non-exclusive readership.
This is the critical point that Rupert is failing to get. He is trying to operate a model of the past, in a world in which non-exclusive readership has become the norm. The effect of this is going to be to take the Times out of the running. It is no longer part of the broadsheets that you glance through online. People are not going to subscribe to just one, and in a world in which only one charges, they are going to carry on scanning through the others, without particularly missing the Times, which has nothing very distinctive to offer.
Historically, News has always had a problem thinking the content issue through. Consider the case of LineOne, many years ago. The argument then was, we have all this distinctive content that we will use to force people to subscribe to our Internet Access service because that is the only way we will allow access to it. They will pay a premium for the access in order to get the content. In those days the contrary argument was made: if the content is so valuable, just sell it to anyone, regardless of who they get their access from. At which those in charge of the content rightly flinched, and admitted that it was unsaleable.
OK, then, what made them think it was saleable at a premium when bundled with access? And as it turned out, it was not, and the access business was sold off to Tiscali and the Times went online free.
They have been obsessed with the model of Sky, where they got exclusive rights, used those to sell dishes and subscriptions. But it depends on having 'must have' content. What Rupert is refusing to accept right now is that, except in the case of the WSJ, he has no 'must have' content. None. Columnists? Who cares?
As the article says, the Times has simply vanished from online. No-one links to it, no-one quotes it, as far as can be seen no-one subscribes to it. It has vanished. Give it another few months, and the effect will be the same as if it had no online presence.
Now ask yourself: if someone had gone to Rupert six months ago, and proposed closing down their web presence, would he have agreed? It would probably have been a short meeting, and a very blunt one. But that is what, probably without in the least intending to, he has now done.
So I bet you don't have any Sony appliances in your house, never buy new DVDs or BluRays, refuse to watch ColumbiaTristar movies, or recent MGM ones too, because that would be funding DRM. An in this Murdoch based storyline, that includes anything by Fox as well. Those DVDs you watch? DRMed. Hypocrite much?
I pay the license fee, and people who weasel out of it on a technicality piss me off. You admittedly watch TV, you admittedly enjoy the output of the BBC yet put two fingers up to paying for it while the rest of us do. Shame on you.
While the subscription service may or may not be failing, it's important to remember that Michael Wolff runs Newser and Newser wants to get all of its content for FREE. So he naturally wants the paywalls to fail because if they work he won't find anything to aggregate. He'll actually have to pay the reporters himself. Please keep this bias in mind.
And the Newsday example with 35 subscribers is also flawed because the newspaper threw in the online version for free with a paid subscription to the dead tree edition and the dead tree edition was CHEAPER than the online because it was subsidized by ads. Naturally most people chose the cheaper option.
I'm not sure what part of the country you live in, but as I recall it, belief in WMD was anything but pervasive. I, along with numerous friends, acquaintances, family members, coworkers, etc, was absolutely appalled that we were actually going to invade Iraq based on such flimsy pretenses.
Mind you, I'm not exactly a liberal pacifist who was concerned about unjustly attacking poor ol' Saddam - my concerns about the WMD evidence mostly stemmed from the fact that invading Iraq was bound to be a decade-long (or longer) quagmire, which would cost the lives of thousands of American soldiers, not to mention countless billions of taxpayer dollars. I just wanted to be assured that there was a damn good reason for going through with all of that.
I kept asking the question, "Where's the hard evidence?". There never was any. All I ever saw was smoke and mirrors, lots of dog-and-pony shows with paper-thin wisps of "evidence", and "intelligence" reports that absolutely reeked of political spin and creative interpretation. Honestly, I probably would have found it more convincing if they'd just said that they'd consulted a witch-doctor who had divined the presence of WMDs in Iraq while in a peyote-induced trance.
And mind you, I'm not someone you would generally consider a liberal, so it's not as if my experience was due to my own political leanings, nor those of my peers. I live in the Los Angeles area, and my friends, family, and coworkers are roughly an equal mix of liberals, conservatives, and apolitical types. Even among my conservative friends, there seemed to be some palpable concern that the WMD evidence was a bit flimsy. I'd hardly call that a pervasive belief. Then again, that was just my own experience. YMMV.
But how sustainable is the current paradigm?
As sustainable as it's always been. The Illinois Times survives, makes a profit, and pays its staff on advertising alone. Even its paper version is free, and its yearly "Best of" poll winners all proudly have their IT "Best Of" awards displayed on their walls, even higher class joints like Saputo's and D'Arcy's.
Free sells, but only if it's quality. If your content sucks or your ads are intrusive, your newspaper will die.
Free Martian Whores!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As been stated many times before, the US politically is pretty right leaning. This includes Hillary Clinton who, along with Joe Lieberman, was pushing for enforcing ESRB ratings as law (in response to the Hot Coffee mod). In comparison, a more liberal place like France seems more unwilling to rate anything R-rated (look at some popular 12 and over titles).
Two things. One, the intelligence community was saying that nuclear WMDs would take 5 to 10 years to develop, minimal even if Saddam had gotten uranium (look at Iran's difficulties in refining large quantities of uranium; consider that to go from natural Uranium (0.7% U-235) to nuclear fuel (3% U-235) requires a lot of work and a hell of a lot more work to get to nuclear weapon grade (97% U-235)). Two, the evidence was incredibly flimsy that Saddam had made or had components for chemical weapons (the last time Saddam had chemical weapons, the US and Europe sold him a good bit of the base components). Three, Hans Blix, one of the United Nations' top two weapons experts (and an inspector) said the evidence was shaky, at best. According to Scott Ritter who was UN weapons inspector during most of the 90s, even though only perhaps 90-95% of all factories/weapons/etc, Iraq wasn't a significant threat with what remained. As much as it was consistently clear to Blix and others that Saddam wanted WMDs and repeatedly tried to test the UN to see if he could wiggle in a way to import components and construct WMDs, it was also clear that Saddam kept backing down because he realized that the reprisal for actually pushing the UN that far wouldn't actually work.
In short, the very people who'd actually been in Iraq for years on the ground and who had personally dealt with the oversight of such things--ie, the people one probably should really be listening to if one cared about the facts and the truth--were specifically stating before the Iraq War that the war was not justified based on WMDs. Meanwhile, the CIA was well on its way towards overthrowing Saddam; and incidentally, the CIA is precisely where all this questionable intelligence was coming from.
Btw, because I was actually listening to Hans Blix before the Iraq War, I was against it before it started. I was also quite aware, with the progressive drum beating as the war start date approached that the people in charge had little interest in actually reviewing the facts since they'd settled on a train of thought and a course of action (consider the Bush years and Global Warming and how long it took for even the smallest acknowledgment that "the evidence is still unclear" was some rather clear bullshit). As for the Senate Democrats who are moderate or even left, most acted like pitiful, fearful politicians. It was better to vote for a war blindly than to look "weak" on terrorism (remember the whole push for the Iraq-Al Quaeda connnection; that's why). Btw, perhaps that's the reason so many people voted for Obama, since he never voted for the war and that made him, once the war was unpopular, look steadfast and strong (and politically lucky, since he wasn't in the Senate until 2005); but, I digress.
In double short, the only people who believed in the WMDs were (a) those in power (which I'd argue were rather far righ
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
because they don't accept advertising so their reviews can be truly independent
Independent, but not unbiased. They have at least one advertiser - themselves. After the publicity from Suzuki, they purposefully made the next one tip, violating every stated testing standard they had and even inventing new ones in order to make cars tip. And, of course, when they succeed, they issue press releases and paste it on the cover and such. Try reading one of their articles on, say, cereal (I read only because it was after the article in question above, where I checked it in the library to see how bad their lies were in their issue in question). It reads like a comedy. They rate it on things so subjective as to be useless. Then present it like a fact. Or their car reliability, where a Ford Probe will receive worse marks than a Mazda MX-6, despite both being made in the same factory to be essentially the same other than some minor styling and options. And they don't even try to explain or understand statistics, they just use them however they see fit to give the readers what they want to hear so they keep buying.
It's uninformed biased crap that's pretty much useless, but at least it is independent.
Learn to love Alaska
"2. Bush lied about WMDs" True.
To lie about something, you have to know that it is not true at the time you say it. At the time, all the indications were that Saddam did have WMDs.
However, I think that either Saddam really wanted everyone to think he had WMDs when he didn't, or more likely, he thought he did, and all Saddam's people were lying to him to cover up that they didn't have anything after all, whether due to fraud (spending the money on something else) or because they really couldn't get them. And because Saddam thought he had the WMDs, the intelligence agencies were duped into thinking he actually did. Then it was simply a matter of the bullshit floating to the top.
"6. Bush went AWOL" True.
Is that the thing that CBS and Dan Rather went on about, allegedly a typewritten document from the '70s, that turned out to be a 100% graphic match for something printed in a standard proportional font from Microsoft Word? And once that was pointed out, it instantly and completely vanished from the news cycle?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }