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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.