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Times Paywall Blocks 90% of Traffic
Jamie was one of several readers to note the not particularly surprising results of the recent Times switch to a pay-wall. Apparently a 90% drop in readership is the reward. But then again, if they are paying real money, it might still be ok for them. It doesn't look very good though.
The real question is how many of those remaining users are actual *new* subscribers and not just those who had already had print subscriptions even before the change. I suspect that number would make these stats even more dismal.
It seems to me like the Times would have been better off offering *premium* content to subscribers rather than closing off the entire site altogether. At a certain point, if you're not out there in the digital world, you risk utter irrelevance. You can have the best reporters in the world, but if they're speaking to an empty room, they might as well not exist.
Add to this the fact that they supposedly won't even allow their subscribers to cut/copy from stories or do searches, and it seems like a program almost designed to intentionally drive away interest. Even the subscribers are treated with open hostility.
Maybe Murdoch is adopting the Cartmanland business plan (i.e., if you tell people they can't come, they'll line up in droves). But I don't think it works that way in real life.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
the voucher system for journalists to allow them access to the site did not work and they then had to set up paid for accounts. Depending on the numbers that would further distort the figures.
If 10% of the traffic remains even with the paywall, that's phenomenal success. On the other hand, most statistics are made up on the spot. 90% of all people know that.
I would wager that only people who think mainstream media delivers "news" would pay for their "news" but everyone but old people who can't understand what news is because the grew up in times when access to information was severly limited and the mainstream media was the source of news and it is still so their minds.
So the small part of old people that uses the internet for their reading of Times and are willing to pay for their "news" was 10% of Times total internet userbase.
... is that people will just say "screw that!" and go to another website where they can get it for free. World events aren't copyrighted to any one provider (for now, anyway...)
£2 probably represents 2000 ad views. With their original viewing figures they would've had to have 200 ad views a week per user to make that kind of revenue which is a big ask.
So long as they can maintain or grow those subscriber numbers, this has actually been fairly successful.
Eventually the suckers, I mean, users will come around.
However, some have registered: Dan Sabbagh, formerly the media correspondent for the Times, suggests that about 150,000 users registered for access to the Times and Sunday Times while they were free, with 15,000 apparently agreeing to pay money.
This is very sad to see. It will only encourage others.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Because if you're a publicist, why would you offer The Times content in return for publicity that nobody will see? If you're a columnist, how does it help your career to write articles that nobody reads, or can link to?
By reducing the number of readers, they're not just cutting off advertising revenue, they're also making it more expensive to obtain content.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If every single store in your city offers free parking, and you decide to charge for it, and you find you still have 1 in 10 customers willing to shop there, are you doing well when you're too lazy to check the parking lot for cars?
Once the Times does that, they'll find that 10% is mooching parking from elsewhere or taking the bus. And, no surprise, the other store owners are even more solidified that they keep their free parking (by towing away your customers).
Now you could get away with charging for parking if everyone else is doing it, but lets face it, we're not running out of internet, so that won't happen.
Because two days earlier, the very same newspaper reported they'd only lost 66% of their readership.
I tried reading the article from the NY Times itself, but it's behind a paywall.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Yup: Paywall bad idea. They will reap the consequences, blah blah blah.
The hardest thing they're going to have to learn to grasp in new media economics is that it's not just their business model that's changing. It's not just that they're going to have to stop expecting people to pay for their services like they did before. Their entire industry is going through a massive shift. Personally, the only way I see newspapers surviving is that they become tremendously small outfits. 10-man operations that produce solely for the web and offer a print-on-demand version for those who are interested. Your staff of a dozen reporters and the hundred people who support them aren't going to last here. Print journalism as an industry just can't support those people the way it used to.
Is journalism dead? No. But I think massive news companies are. Journalists and the "Ace Reporter" are going to become free agents. Newspapers are going to become aggregators of the information they collect, and they'll likely have to secure a story with a fee or a retainer. I have sympathy for the people whose jobs are disappearing, but I think every time a job disappears, a new industry grows and more jobs are created.
In a semi-related note, I think that DC should do a Superman storyline where Clark gets laid-off because the Planet can't support his job anymore.
Berner Zeitung (one of the two main papers in the Swiss capital) used this approach about 10 or so years ago, but (unfortunately, I thought) shut it down after a bit over a year.
What they did was to allow anyone free access to the full articles of the current day, but at the same time offer an online subscription for (IIRC) ~USD 40,-/yr. The online subscriber got some extra benefits in being able to access all full articles - not just the current day; and were able to download pdf page views of the actual papers as well, and give a search functionality for their news archive.
Overall at the time, I really liked the offering, and was saddened when they shut it down (not profitable)... I just think, they had been too early trying it. I think it could be a decent model for a lot of papers today...
Imagine how the advertisers feel. It's like 90% of the former Times web readership installed adblock overnight.
used to be that they owned the classifieds. if you wanted to sell something you would advertise in a newspaper. then ebay, google, craigslist and others took the market and the newspapers didn't do anything about it. i know someone who advertised a condo for sale in the NY Times last year and i thought it was a joke and a waste of money. so 1990's. these days you do craiglist and sell it yourself or go to a realtor. even the realtors don't advertise anything in the newspapers. the same ad every weekend just to get customers in. the lead time is so long that it's a waste of time trying to advertise new properties in the newspaper.
if the newspapers want revenue they need to start an open source type for sale/job listing site and share the revenue. but it's too late
....... login thinking that since I already payed for a sub on my Kindle that I might at least be given access to the website. To my horror I found out that they wanted me to pay a new sub :/
I tried to submit a question asking if I might get some money off the subscription as I already received The Times on my Kindle but guess what? The question submission form on their website doesn't work! Awesome \o/
I'll stick to the Guardian. I've also canceled my Kindle sub.
This is based on an estimate by the Guardian, without any data provided by the Times to back it up. It could well be true, but it's basically wild speculation without actual numbers to back it up.
is how much revenue a subscriber generates compared to a visitor that generates only ad revenue. It could well be that this is a more profitable model than open access even with a giant drop in readership.
It really surprises me that 10% of people still read it. I have accidentally followed news feeds to the firewall half a dozen times, I would have thought that only 1 or 2% would have gone on to pay to see the page.
The Times understand that they are undergoing an initial loss to set a new standard in online news. They hope that other news sites will follow suit. If and after they do, you will not be able to get the story on any other web site. Subsequently, subscribers should increase and revenue should increase.
So, it's not surprising that they're not making a profit on this switch, because frankly, they're probably not trying to.
Their stockholders, management, and reporters had been riding the gravy train far too long. They published trash and expected big money for it. Newsflash (hehe), you can't charge 2010 prices for poorer quality early 1900's media. Back in the late 1800 and early 1900s, newspapers were a 1-2 person effort and barely scraped by. Mega-urban newspapers had their boom-time later and made some obscene profits.
So sad for you paper media, but those days are OVER. Your profit margin is evaporating. Tighten-up, change, or die. The sad truth is that newspapers haven't been providing any added value for quite some time. The information available in them is available elsewhere free. Newsflash (again, hehe), NO ONE IS GOING TO PAY YOU IF YOU DO NOT ADD ANY ACTUAL VALUE. They certainly aren't going to pay the ridiculously huge sums you desire.
"It's only $X amount of money for a person." Once again, how much you want for your product or how small you feel the amount is, is irrelevant. The relevant figure for you, Mr. Newspaperman, is how much the average reader is WILLING to pay for the value you are going to add. Better figure that out fast. Are there NO competent freaking business people left in the world?
Those figures look like this is going to be a successful strategy for the company. Other "apocryphal" sources would have suggested that 95% loss would have been expected.
Actually, the Times can make this a great success. They've just filtered out all the freeloaders and now have a nice exclusive club of readers willing to pay for something on the Internet. I would say that's far, far more valuable than all the riff-raff that want something for free. They'll be charging top-dollar for advertising/features now, and not have any problems filling those side columns.
"WhichTimes"? This article is really tagged "WhichTimes"? It's the real and proper Times, damnit. The one that's called "The Times" (unless it is a Sunday, at which point it is called "The Sunday Times").
On a more serious note, it's good to see that they're getting large amounts of people abandonning ship for other places, but 10% subscription rate still seems worryingly good and enough for them to keep it there.
You know, following a case for months, bribing your way into certain "circles", and so on. Otherwise newspapers will become mere newswire and blogger aggregators.
On the face of it, this actually looks like a success -- if you believe that they actually retained an amazing 10% (about which I'm skeptical) and if they can sustain that rate (i.e. people don't tire of paying after a month or two).
Ads don't pay much. When I get an IO for an ad that pays a penny per impression ($10 CPM), I am very happy. If there are n people paying 2 pounds (I'll call that $3) per week, then to match that, the free-access-but-ads model with 10*n people would need to generate $0.30 per week per user from ads. You would have to be pretty lucky to get advertisers to pay that much.
I'm probably a minority dwarfed by free-loading readers, but free online NYT access led me to buy a full 7-day a week subscription to the paper.
I used to (and still do) go to Google News for my daily news digest (one of many sources I'd visit). Over time, I noticed that many of the stories I was interested were from either the NY Times or the LA Times. Furthermore, I noticed that for stories I'd read on many sites linked to from Google News, the NY Times (and LA Times) versions were regularly better written and more informative in my opinion.
Due to this (and the fact that I live in the suburbs of NYC) I started to regularly read the full paper online on the NYT website. After a few months of this, I decided that I found this quality reporting valuable, and worth supporting. Furthermore, I relocated a little further away from the city and was now commuting by train instead of by car. So I then decided to by a subscription. Now I have the paper delivered every day, and they have me as a full, loyal subscriber. All because of the free online access they provided.
But for everyone of me, there are probably a lot of free-loaders.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
I could subscribe to The Times and set up a clone site in some remote country, copying and pasting their content verbatim alongside some adverts for viagara and porn.
How much traffic do you think I'd get? How much could I charge for advertising there? I bet it's happening/happened as I write this.
No sig today...
You know, following a case for months, bribing your way into certain "circles", and so on.
I believe you'll find that most newspapers stopped doing that years ago.
Otherwise newspapers will become mere newswire and blogger aggregators.
I don't know which newspapers you read, but that's precisely what most of them seem to be these days... which is why there's no point in paying for them when you can just read press releases directly rather than wait for some journo to rewrite them in the house style.
One of the things that make me surf away, and stay away, are pop-ups that instantiate when my mouse simply goes over something; if I'm not clicking on it, I don't WANT it. That's the worst mistake a web designer can make, in my estimation. Even worse than annoying ads. Rollovers aren't just a "distraction", they're direct interference with what I'm trying to do -- they cover text and images with no warning and no desire whatsoever on my part to see the popup material.
The same goes for menus - if I don't click on it, I didn't ASK for it. There are many reasons my mouse may go from hither to yon on a web page, and the ONLY way you know I wanted something it went over is to receive a legitimate click.
It's far too annoying to treat a web page as a maze of locations you can't let your mouse go through without being abused by a pop-up; once that crap starts, I'm right out of there, and I mean right now.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Looks like the Associated Press and Reuters wire articles must be good enough for the masses.
No different than..
Downsampled/compressed 720p streams sent to your 1080p capable TV
Downsampled/compressed music (mp3s) on your iPod.
The moral of the story here.. the masses love a great "value" and the most important factor is cost over quality.
NYT was just charging for opinions. Agree or disagree with their columnists, anyone could read a few Bob Herbert columns and write them based on the template he uses. I'm surprised there isn't a Random Bob Herbert Column Generator where you can plug in a headline and generate one of his columns, since he always says the same thing. Gail Collins and Dowd always said nothing. The only columnist of any value was Kristoff, and most people aren't going to fork it over to read him. The problem is liberal opinions are both copious and free on the Internet. No need to pay for them when so much content is free. So the NYT charge-for-opinion things was a fail from day one.
When the web started, web pages were nodes of info, provided by the people running the sites, with the intent of informing the visitors. That was the whole shooting match. This went on for years, with many cool websites springing up that brought information on a topic together, as well as opinions and tips and so on. Hobbies, science, programming, HTML, special interest groups, what eventually became to be called blogs, etc.
At some point, the amount of activity caught the attention of commercial interests, and they stumbled in here with the idea that they could apply the physical model - print it, buy it to read it - to the web. That's pretty much been a major fail since day one. It has also bought us all manner of nonsense from congress, trying to force the web into the physical model using DRM, copyright takedowns, all that shit.
Every time I see someone put up a paywall, I chuckle... because in fact, in order for that to work, the content will have to be not only useful, but found nowhere else on the web. And for a news organization... that's basically impossible. All they can do is get about a one minute head start (and not often that) before someone twitters or emails or blogs about the same thing, Google or some other inquisitive site finds it, and it's all over the place.
And we've all learned about the bias and tendency to deliver news far too heavily leavened with opinion -- those that want to pay for that are already paying for Fox, CNN, etc. on cable.
The "web publishing industry" is really a two-faced monster; On one side is the original web ethos, where we publish info in order to share and build community; on the other are the newly-arrived commercial interests, where they're trying to tap the community that is looking at the free stuff and get them to pay for what is all too often lesser quality. How many times have you read an article on a commercial site, and then gone looking for actual info via Google? I do that all the time, because the news articles are still written for the least common denominator; a catchy (to a search engine) title, a lede comprehensible to a 90 IQ reader, and a dumbed down story (often infected with a "counterpoint" that has little, if any, legitimacy.) Then you search, find an actual page where someone has taken the time to go into depth on the subject... and inevitably, it's a free page, done in the community spirit.
Yeah, paywalls. Good luck with that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This was the Times of LONDON, folks. UK. Britain. Other side of the Pond from The NY Times.
The NY Times did something akin to this to themselves years ago, and realized within a few years that their columnists plummeted from most-quoted status. Whereupon they backed off considerably.
My local smalltown newspaper's publisher prattles on endlessly about how un-broke his paywall model is and how it has to be that way or news won't survive. As a result, I google up equivalent stories when I need to share them. He's captaining the Titanic, IMHO. Tautologies and contradictions at every turn, mixed with a naive misunderstanding of copyright. Meanwhile, I *LIKE* newspapers & want to see them thrive. But I'm less sanguine that they will -- it's still looking like a train wreck in slo-mo.
"I'm probably a minority dwarfed by free-loading readers, but free online NYT access led me to buy a full 7-day a week subscription to the paper"
:)
And no one paid you to sit in a room all day typing out such propaganda
We're not `free-loading', we just don't see the need to pay for something twice. Once to our ISP and twice to the NYT. It would be like paying the washing machine company and the electric company to wash our own cloths. When are the media people and the ISPs goign to exercise their collective asses and move to micropayments. The real problem is that the convertional news organizations such as the NYT don't seem to have yet realized how much of a game changer the Internet has become. You no longer control the news - now get used to it.
They are saving on servers, bandwidth, etc. so who knows, it may even out.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
For USians this is quite confusing - I assumed the submitter speaking of the New York Times.
"So, my understanding of this whole very interesting situation, is that journalism used to work by rewarding the journalists who went out and got a scoop, did investigative reporting or uncovered some huge scandal. That information was priceless and they would spend precious hours building up that report for an air date. Once their channel or printed paper ran that story, it would take a day or more for the rest to follow suit. Meanwhile you had a whole day of the public's attention on your channel/newspaper/magazine.
That hasn't been the case, at least since the days of Watergate, when real journalists working for the Washington Post broke the story. The self same Washington Post that brown-nosed Bush 11 in his bogus war on terror in Iraq. The same kind of `free' press that never broke the fake weapons of mass destruction dossier story here. The one journalist who did being fired and a weapons inspector being found `suicided' in the woods.
What killed real journalism was the concerted attempt by big business to co-opt it as an arm of corporate propaganda. It's the free Internet that's disrupting the strategy.
A loss of 90% of readership isn't an issue if you weren't getting any money out of them in the first place.
Or to put it another way, that's a bit like the local bar offering free drinks on Saturday night for the past two years and then suddenly stopping one weekend. Sure, the numbers may have gone down by 90% but at least the people there now are paying for their drink and you don't have to employ quite as many staff. Plus you could always move to a smaller building and reduce your overheads even more.
I doubt The Times will share the financials before and after the paywall went up but I'm sure it would be interesting reading. Only then will we be able to work out whether or not this was a success.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
To the advertisers this would mean that it has lost almost all its value in advertising revenue, so the remaining subscriptions had better than make up for that lost revenue stream. People who pay for a service don't want ads, and there is no longer any non-paying customers. Any advertising agency with half a brain will just move on and find some other site to pay those X-billion dollars a year to. There is no value in advertising when 100% of the paying customers reading it expect to *not* have to put up with reading ads. (sound of the other foot-gun)
If a reporter speaks to an empty room, does he make any sound?
I believe it's time for all the news outlets to get creative and hire a bunch of 3D animators like this Taiwanese news outlet did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HUBVuaCIPo&feature=player_embedded Leave the news researching to outlets like AP and focus on editorials and hilarious reenactments. There's a reason why The Daily Show and the Colbert Show have such ridiculously high ratings. Sure sure, we all want our news, but it's time to realize the industry needs to do more than move from printing on paper to printing online. It might take years if not decades for them to get it right; the music industry is still trying to figure it out.
FTFA: It's a pound for a 24 hour pass, that is insane! Subscribe for 2 pounds a week, or 104 a year, thats the same as the insurance on my Jeep.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Between this and the possibility of Glenn Beck going blind I am a happy person.
Newspapers -- at least the dailies -- had largely stopped paying for investigative journalism (and original content more generally) and become newswire aggregators before the internet was even a significant medium for news distribution to the public, along with other cost-cutting moves in the consolidation and cost-cutting trend in the industry that was in full swing by the 1980s.
And the spiral of declining readership had already begun then, too; and each round of bad readership numbers led to more cost cutting.
Alternative media like the internet sources aren't killing newspapers and, by so doing, killing investigative journalism. The newspaper industry had already started the process of killing distinct, original content in each newspaper, including investigative journalism, long ago, and by doing so was well on the way to killing itself.
The BBC and NPR have been providing news for decades, for free. Both are far more unbiased than the new york times and if I were to go to a website online to get news, it would be either of their sites before the NYT... and that's before I even considered the paywall. The fact of the matter is, the majority of us never visited the NYT website prior to the paywall, and even fewer will after ward. The few times I made have ended up there was via a news agrigator (like slashdot) and now I simply will never go there at all.
Is all news local for a community to be interested in it enough to make it pay somehow, with a combination of advertising, subscription, referrals with local search services, etc.?
Think about it a minute. Will there be 12 or 20 major news organizations in the U.S. trying to report the national news every day? Or is it going to compress to 3-4 outlets, with the rest going back local? If you "go where the customers are", then local markets are BIG, but distributed and can't be targeted universally.
Maybe some of the prior Slashdotters have it right in that only small focused groups of people targeting local businesses, city & county government & users will have a chance of surviving easily where their topics have RELEVANCE to their local population.
iPhone, iPad & computers mean that a local source has inherent value to all the local users, but not necessarily the next town down the road.
News has to match readers with suppliers in broad terms.
If you read the article, the 90% drop is after requiring registration for the free service. That's not a paywall. It's a free-registration-wall. Only 15,000 are paying. "1.2 million daily unique users" "150,000 users registered for access to the Times and Sunday Times while they were free, with 15,000 apparently agreeing to pay money." 15k/1.2M = 1.25%
Truth: $5
The Whole Truth: $50
Lies still free.
This is the NYT; poster of national secrets- controller of the direction of the JournalList Listserv.
Would anyone PAY for this leftist crap? It's *precisely* the same news in all other places, other than FoxNews.
Seriously: why didn't Air America earn it's keep? Think about it.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
You haven't seen journalism today have you? Today, journalism is "find two people who disagree about something, get a quote from both and get some images from another site".
It's funny how trad media complain about there being no *Journalism* in online bloggy media, but they lost their *Journalism* in trad media in the 90's or earlier (in the US).
The real, real question is why is it called a paywall when there is no payments involved? Shouldn't it be a emailgate or a registrationroad or identificationalley or something?
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
who's reading the stories? You prove that Internet readers don't concentrate long enough to understand the stories. This paywall blocks the LONDON Times from the UK, not The New York Times. It is part of Rupert Murdoch's vast FOX News empire.
If this hasn't already been said before, I have a feeling that the only paying subscribers will be people from blogs, sites such as Slashdot and the like. It just seems like they're changing things so that bloggers and other sites just pay for passing on the information after being re-written.
It also gives the Times more chance to put a spin on articles in certain peoples favour. Which then gets passed down to the blogs and other sites.
They've basically just created a huge mess. Folk who DO actually pay to regurgitate the info might - no, almost definitely will - end up with stories conflicting with other main sources.
So who the hell is going to know what is close to the facts? Not that most big news corps don't twist things already.
We're just going to have more poor confused sods, and more debates over what actually happened regarding a certain event or issue.
I am willing to pay for online content, just stop shoveling flash ads in my face. i once paid for Salon.com but they still blitzed me with advertising. i use privoxy for most web browsing. i will pay if you give me something of value. this is why i probably wont use the iPad either - i'd be paying and they'd be iAd-ding...
Ask Me About... The 80's!
The only model that will produce good quality news, now that the internet has changed everything, is public owned, non-profit news.
News is a necessary service required for a functioning democracy. It is no less important than water, electricity, roads, or other services that are typically government owned, or local public ownership.
Would you pay 5 dollars a month for a local (or another 5 for a national) news agency that had a TV channel, a newspaper, and who's board of directors was elected by the public under the mandate of objective reporting? Zero advertising allowed. Not beholden to any corporation.
How do we know if they are talking about the New York Times or the Times Union? Saying "The Times" is pretty ambiguous.