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.

Comments

The real question

[elrous0]

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.

Re:The real question

[rolfwind]

I prefer the Economist myself, but the marketshare argument is old - many Japanese companies destroyed profit in pursuit of this elusive goal. But what good is it to chase readers who go so far as to block ads and don't think the content maker is entitled to anything?

Apple destroyed the notion that marketshare is end-all, be-all. It's only useful if you can leverage it somehow, but when you do, inevitably 50% of the rats escape the ship for the next thing.

Re:The real question

[elrous0]

Well, /. itself is a pretty good example of how this can work. The basics are available for free, but subscribers get nice perks. I'm more than happy to pay extra for those perks. But I never would have even considered subscribing if, on my first visit to the site, I had been greeted with a big wall that said "You can't see ANYTHING here until you pay us."

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody's entitled to anything. You are supposed to come up with reasons that people will want to give you money so they can get something more valuable to them. That's how a business transaction works.

Re:The real question

[GIL_Dude]

You know, the NYT seems to have some sort of a "sign up" wall days (free sign up). I have been using the News and Weather app that is standard on Android 2.1 to view news stories on my phone. Unfortunately, many of the stories lately seem to be NYT links. When you follow these, you get maybe a paragraph or two of article followed by a "sign up for free to see the rest of the article and all our other stuff". That's not quite as annoying as a pay wall, but it isn't something I am going to do. Creating an account and typing it into a phone is a bit too difficult to make it worth while to me. So now when I see an article that is on NYT I just look elsewhere.

Re:The real question

[sorak]

That may work for /., and I'm not saying the paid wall will work for anybody else, but the problem is that /. has a much lower overhead than traditional media, because they do not pay reporters to do investigative journalism. If every story linked on the site had to be written by a slashdot employee, then their accounting would look a little different. Then there's the fact that, when people think about news media, they seem to think only of the major players in large markets. Small towns, consisting of 100,000 people or less need news as well, but it is nearly impossible to support local reporters, editors, and managers when you're getting paid 2 dollars for every 1,000 banners delivered.

If we assumed 50,000 hits per day, that's $100 per day for every banner shown on a typical page. If we assumed three reporters and an editor, getting paid $30,000 per year, one IT guy and a manger, getting paid $40,000 per year, then the website would have to display six banners per page, and maintain a paper interesting enough to keep the 50,000 impressions per day they're currently getting. ($200,000 in salary, divided by 365 is $547 per day). This isn't taking into account other expenses, like paying rent, benefits,taxes, hardware costs, or anything else. The point is that the banner-driven business model is not going to work for small papers, unless some significant changes take place.

And that is why newspapers want to kill the internet and go back to the 80's/early 90's.

I don't know what the answer is, and I don't think paid walls are the answer either, but local newspapers will have to do something differently if they wish to survive. The problem is that the only people willing to pay for content are advertisers, and what that's just a pittance.

Re:The real question

[rickb928]

This is an 'old' truth. What's the most perishable product the local supermarket sells?

Eggs? Nope.

Lettuce? Nu uh.

Milk? not even close.

Newspapers. They are delivered fresh every morning, and no matter how you store them, they are pretty much useless and unwanted by noon. Afternoon papers. were so perishable they woudl be delivered around 4pm and didn't even get past the dinner hour and useless. By 8pm no one wanted one. The stores made the publishers take them back the next day.

Unless you were moving and needed dishwrap, in which case you could usually buy the Sunday paper for half-price. Cheaper than actual wrapping paper.

They call it fish-wrap for a reason.

So the NYT is finding out not much has changed. The Internet has compressed the news cycle from about 4 hours (breakfast, paper, work, coffee pot, water cooler, lunch, on to the next story) to about 15 minutes (breakfast, email, Google, forwards to friends, blog, done). What we get now is the repetition of the current 's t o r y', and then on to the next one.

I recall knowing a lot of people in local television in the 80s. I spotted a reporterette out with her cameraman onw day downtown, and mentioned that I saw a competing station's crew down the street about 10 minutes ago. She panicked - "OH MY GOD, what did we miss?" Turns out a jewelry shop owner was running for mayor. She already did that story at city hall. But it was competitive. Guess where? The smallest market in the U.S. that had all 4 networks at the time. News has always been competitive. Now it's also more open. The big guys don't have the advantages. You don't need to buy ink by the barrel any more, just by the megabyte.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

Additionally, everyone should be surfing using an ad blocker simply due to recorded incidents of malware via ads. Noscript is good too.

Re:The real question

[delinear]

Exactly, and if readers are going so far as to block ads, I would suggest looking at the reasons why they're blocking ads. It's generally not because they begrudge the site owner earning money, it's more often that the ads are damn annoying and a major distraction to the content. If you can make the ads less distracting, load in a timely fashion and not weigh in at several meg, you may find that's a more sustainable business model on the web than just sticking up a toll booth.

Re:The real question

[pmonje]

Actually in this instance, that's not how the business transaction works. That $1.50 you pay for the paper version barely pays for distribution. Newspapers get their profit from advertising. The main problem is that internet advertising sucks. The profit is from click-thrus, not page views, but no one clicks, your eyes basically ignore the ads and you move on to the actual text. Even without an ad-blocker people know to skip the top of the page to avoid banners and stay away from the margins. That's because they are flashy and filled with crap. They contain nothing useful for the reader. Newspaper ads are different, they have more connection to you and even contain useful information. That 1/2 page ad for a local car dealer gives you a general idea of local car prices, same for the real estate ads. The supermarket ad tells you what's on sale this week and gives you coupons. Even ads for local businesses that you will never use promote name recognition and form a sort of local directory in your head keeping you current on your community. The ads in newspapers are relevant to you, they actually form a part of the content of a newspaper. Internet ads have never done that. Google tried with adsense, but it never really works unless you're a lonely man with a small penis and erectile disfunction.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the answer has something to do with what they have and can offer versus what Joe Blogger/news aggregators have and can offer. This doesn't mean that they don't have to do a shift to survive, but I think it can be done.

Newspapers are very organized and have quite a bit in terms of resources. News aggregators just pick up whatever and Joe Blogger tends to write about things important to him/herself. Joe Blogger has finite time, news aggregators don't have very good user-based filtration systems in general.

I think that if newspapers started producing very intelligent categorization systems and allowed their users to pick the types of news they're interested in, it would create a lot of value for people. What I mean by very intelligent is that the scope of news is not always immediately apparent when you look at a story: Copyright, for example, can and does affect anything in this day and age. Slashdot somewhat attempts to do this through the use of tags, but maybe there are better ways to do it.

I know that personally, I don't care about a lot of the cruft in news about things like crime in local to other parts of my state (or even out of my state), stories about mothers carrying a million babies at once, etc. If someone were to have an automated content system where I could get the news that I care about without having to search for it, it would be very valuable. In this way, the quality of the content delivery would become the competition. Looked at from another perspective: There's more information than ever before. Filtering it down to a consumable and useful level is value.

I could be wrong, but I think this would be something that fits in with not only the current culture, but also with the previous business models of newspapers. They still make money on advertising. Yeah, they take a hit in terms of revenue, but that'll happen any time there's a shift of this magnitude occurring - at least they'd still be alive.

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a mid-sized news paper. Population of the city is 80,000. population of people residing in the entire delivery area is 250,000. we get about 4.1-4.5 million pageviews per month. We also have several sister papers and websites that provide even more localized news. right now between banner ads, text ads and classified postings online advertising makes close to 20% of our profit, that's more money than we get for paper subscriptions. A paid subscription model would not come close to making-up the money we get from online advertisers (if we lost 90% of our online readers)

Re:The real question

[natehoy]

Actually, your post demonstrates the effects of the changes in the coverage of the news. It's becoming centralized, and as such the only news that's profitable is what sells ads (sensationalism) and/or what is cheapest to collect or needs little verification (opinion).

And if you can sell your story as "the story no one else will tell you", then people will come back and watch YOUR ads.

Your gross misconception of certain communities is an excellent example of the effects, and the very bleeding of polarizing opinion you decry into what is supposed to be news coverage.

Because keepin' you hatin' means keepin' you watchin', which sells ads. You're unwittingly serving as a perfect example of the same problems you decry.

Be especially wary of those outlets that claim to have exclusive access to the truth behind the news, or cover stories that no one else "dares tell you", or claims not to have an agenda and to be completely unbiased.

Because that's just not possible, and you're far more likely to be manipulated if you can be tricked into believing that your chosen news outlet is free of bias. Once their bias becomes your baseline for "truth", they've won.

Re:The real question

[kg8484]

If you can make the ads less distracting, load in a timely fashion and not weigh in at several meg, you may find that's a more sustainable business model on the web than just sticking up a toll booth.

Speaking as someone with an adblocker, I have to say that this still will not work. Why? Because other people will use the annoying ads because they pay more money. So people like me will just install an adblocker and not touch the settings.

Say I am new to the internet. I visit Anne's site which has a lot of ads that annoy me. I ask my friend Bob how I can get around this and he sets me up with an adblocker. I'm not going to even know how to whitelist certain pages. In fact, "whitelist" would sound like something the Black Panthers carry around, and I don't want any part of that. So now when I visit Carmen's site which contains unobtrusive banner ads, she still doesn't get paid for the impression.

This is a modern example of the tragedy of the commons. Viewers are grass in the pasture, and each web site operator is a herder, and the cows are the types of ads they have on their web site. Many will try to get more and bigger cows (more ads and more annoying ads), until it is no longer sustainable and the pasture dies (people no longer view ads because everyone has an ad blocker). At this point, even the responsible cattlemen suffer too. This is an oversimplification, but I hope it illustrates my point.

Re:The real question

[Crypto Gnome]

You could have the best damned reporters in the world and some percentage of people will settle on reading a headline off of Slashdot or Google News that reads: "Murdoch Loses 90% of Readers with Times Paywall" instead of going to the source that called the Times and got that datum.

Your argument is ignoring the real facts of the matter. The readers who got all they needed from the well-crafted headline would never pay for your content, no matter what form it was presented in. Those headline-sniffers are the same people who DO NOT purchase newspapers, but merely browse the front-pages while purchasing a latte at their local cafe.

So, implying that 'the internet' somehow (magically) "ruined" those potential customers of yours is UTTER RUBBISH.

You know what KILLS "the news" in the internet? 1KB of "reported news" and ten megabytes of CSS, images, logos, branding, cross-promotion of other sites by the same parent-company, and HUGE FLASHY INTERACTIVE PAGE GRABBING IN YOUR FACE ADVERTISING.

• Page STARTS with *cannot see the content till you click-past this flashy attention grabber* -> website blocked *forever* I'll *NEVER* go back here again
• Video *STARTS WITH* 30 second advertising that cannot be skipped -> website blocked *forever* I'll *NEVER* go back here again

When will all the multinational megacorps understand that *forcing* me to download GIGABYTES of crap from your website is THEFT, pure and simple. That bandwidth costs ME money, every time you PUSH TONS of CRAP at me, YOU ARE STEALING FROM ME.

HOW on earth do you IMAGINE I can *afford* to *subscribe to* (ie , purchase, like as in with MONEY) your *content* when you FORCE me to spend all my hard-earned cash paying my ISP for MORE BANDWIDTH simply to load the front page of your bloated and crapalicious website?

Seriously folks, stop BLAMING everyone else for your own rampant greed and incessant stupidity, it's YOUR OWN FAULT.

10% remains?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:10% remains?

[hedwards]

You're not looking at it correctly. That's 90% of their online customers that are spared from Murdoch's incompetent propaganda. I'd say that's a net win, just not for him.

The risk with paying for news...

[Drakkenmensch]

... 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...)

BANG, BANG, both feet.

[Rogerborg]

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.

It's like parking

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Give it time

[vlm]

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.

You sure? 90% drop in readership would imply the remaining 10% was that "150,000 users". That meaning their competitors just gained 1,350,000 readers, I'm sure they're strongly encouraging all their competitors to install paywalls.

When the local 70s rock station changed to continuous Kenny-G saxophone, and 90% of their listeners left, every other radio station in the state did not see that 90% decline and immediately decide to also switch to 24x7 Kenny-G saxophone.

Self-adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how the advertisers feel. It's like 90% of the former Times web readership installed adblock overnight.

the newspapers screwed up their business models

[alen]

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

These aren't reliable numbers

[jfoobaz]

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.

Success for "News Limited"

[Thorfinn.au]

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.

"Which Times"?!?

[IBBoard]

"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.

Re:Slashdot readers are missing the point!

[nyctopterus]

This seems like the plan, but I don't see how it could possibly work. As more papers go behind paywalls, the remaining free ones will see climbing readership, and due to the economies of scale with online publishing, will start to make real money. Why go behind a paywall then? This is exactly what is happening in the online Times vs. Guardian battle right now. With 30% of the online news market, you might break even, with close to 100%, you'll make a killing.

There will always be free online news, because there is money to be made there, especially if the paywall space is crowded.

Re:Who's going to pay for investigative journalism

[0123456]

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.

And along those lines

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:And along those lines

[tnk1]

Well you have a good point. No one is asking for ads. However, people *do* want to know about products that they are interested in. I will certainly look at and be interested in an ad for a product that is topical to the site I am looking at. They do serve a purpose, if they can be help factual, interesting and not overwhelming.

The major problem is not ads, it is the arms race that the advertisers are in to get bigger, more noticeable and more annoying ads on your screen. At this point, ads are extremely obnoxious. In-network ads with jittery animations of images that have nothing to do with their product, and the gigantic, sea-sickness inducing banner ads that are now invading sites like CNN.com where the whole *page* is shifted downward at page load time and then the whole page is shifted back up when it is done. These are the sorts of things that give ads on web pages a really bad name.

There really is, perhaps not a need, but certainly a good argument for advertisement. The problem is that the advertisements as they are now are trying to overshadow the actual content and that is incredibly annoying, distracting and counterproductive. If the NYT and other content providers had some guts and some intelligence, they would crack down on what advertisers are putting on their pages.

In the end, I think it would even help advertisers if they didn't have to be in the "bigger, more annoying ad" race. The advertisers, even though they pay for the sites, are becoming parasites on those sites: the content is used to generate page views so that they can cram the page with ads, and then those ads eventually kill the content site because of the annoying ads or the fact that the users now use ad-blockers. When the blockers go up, the site dies as advertisers leave, but the ad-blockers also start forcing the advertisers themselves into an arms race with the ad-blockers who are ultimately the users themselves.

Re:And along those lines

[AmiMoJo]

Someone needs to set up a whitelist for AdBlock+. Only companies that show non-evil ads would be allowed on to it. By non-evil I mean:

- No pop-ups or pop-unders
- No animation
- No sound
- No Javascript
- No cookies
- No "1 page per paragraph"
- No porn or other NSFW material

I was tempted to add "no slow loading ads" too because one major but often unmentioned benefit of AdBlock is that you don't have to wait for overloaded and dog slow ad servers to respond before the page finishes loading.

Re:Yet another example of the race to the bottom.

[Eunuchswear]

Looks like the Associated Press and Reuters wire articles must be good enough for the masses.

No, some of us don't want to read Murdochs crap. We can get our news from a real newspaper, like the Guardian, or Libération, or well, just about anything.

Re:free-loading readers ?

[bws111]

Um, you DO pay the washing machine company and the electric company to wash your own clothes. You also pay whatever company you use to heat the water. And the water company. And the sewer company. And the detergent company. Nobody (except maybe you) considers that 'paying twice the same thing'. Most people realize that the washing machine company, the electric company, and all the rest are independent entities and you need all of them to complete your 'wash clothes' goal. Similarly, your ISP and news provider are independent entities which in most cases have nothing to do with one another. You might as well complain that you are already paying for electric to run your computer - why do you need to pay an ISP also?

The newspapers certainly do realize what a game changer the internet has become - many have already folded and the rest are bleeding red ink. They tried the ad-supported 'free' online route, and it just doesn't pay the bills. Now they are changing to 'if you want our content, pay us'. Nothing wrong with that. If you don't want their content, don't pay them. If you have a better suggestion, I am sure they'd love to hear it.

Re:Clearing out the riff-raff

[ztransform]

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.

Indeed. Apple, of course, have this same advantage. They know their users are all willing to pay money, lots of money, often without regard to the actual value of the product/service they are receiving.

Anybody subscribing to The Times' new technically inferior website (to their old one) is clearly not-all-that-discerning when it comes to paying for things.

Maybe The Times do know what they are doing (or appear that way by accident).