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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."
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.
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.
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.
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 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.