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

[Tangential]

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."

I'm pretty sure that this is the model that the NYT abandoned 6 or 7 years ago as basically not worth the trouble. I guess they decided that advertising was worth more to them at the time. They've been talking about bringing back a paywall lately. I wonder how this result will impact that decision.

They might find more revenue with premium content only available thru subscriptions using dedicated, well designed iPhone/iPad apps.

Re:The real question

[eldavojohn]

You can have the best reporters in the world, but if they're speaking to an empty room, they might as well not exist.

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.

Enter the internet. For all intents and purposes of this discussion, she is the instantaneous transmission of such news stories. And duplication. How much time are you the center of attention when you break the story? A minute? Two minutes? 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. And if I run a blog, all I need do is paraphrase everything in your article and suddenly I'm a contender for the endpoint of this information.

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.

What premium content do you have in mind? Do you think that doing even more exhaustive research on a story is going to change any of what I just explained? And what are you going to do when a blogger subscribes to your $5 per week premium content and then blogs about all of it at freetimes.blogspot.com? What then? Copyright lawsuits? Nobody cares. People say "offer premium content" with a wave of their hands. Well, what did you have in mind? I tried to discuss an alternative of this on Slashdot to no avail where basically there would be a pyramid of fractions of ad payments from those subscribed to your site cascading up to the original source.

Re:The real question

[NotQuiteReal]

Here, let me edit your words a bit;

Maybe Murdoch... would ... like the Times ... to ... not exist.

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

[eldavojohn]

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.

What "premium content" does Slashdot offer us as subscribers, exactly? We get plums 20 minutes to an hour ahead of the rest of the people and we can get a set number of pages without ads.

Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers? I have read many of your posts and have a genuine interest in what you might have for ideas to this very broad and allegedly large problem online news sources are facing. And they cannot retreat back to their old ways because the internet is here and is here to stay.

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.

I'm not aware that this is the case. Do you see this when you visit The Times? I am able to read the front page. On other sites like WSJ, they give you a nice little summary and then ask you to pay to read the full on details. Is that the correct way to do premium content? I may sound like a smartass but this topic interests me as I support many local bands through premium content by buying additional artwork, LPs and various digital artifacts along with their albums if I enjoy them. How do I do the same for my favorite news sites?

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

[SharpFang]

Gazeta Wyborcza, about the biggest newspaper in Poland has an interesting approach: current online content is free, archive is paid. You can search it, get a short blurb of found articles but to access them in full, you have to purchase access to the archive, about $5/hour, or more expensive options like monthly etc.

Re:The real question

[natehoy]

Yeah, except Slashdot works on a totally different economy of scale than a newsgathering organization.

How many traffic/camera helicopters does Slashdot have in the air? How many reporters do they hire in the Gulf of Mexico to cover the oil spill? None. They have volunteers submit "reprints" from other organizations who are themselves "reprinters" or in some cases the actual newsgathering organization. They have more volunteers who audit them, and more volunteers to run a vibrant discussion community.

The money gleaned from running Slashdot after paying for bandwidth and a little hookers and blow for the shareholders could never support even a handful of independent cub reporters, much less a decent newsgathering crew or a reprint subscription to Reuters.

Slashdot is actually a prime example of why the traditional print news media are having trouble. It costs a good deal of money to get good coverage of the news, and traditionally subscribers have paid for that. But now it's available everywhere, for free.

They'll dry up, and the only organizations left will be those that are big enough to use economies of scale in advertising to raise enough money. Which means the population of paid professional newsgatherers is going to plummet, replaced by reprints of the gist of Twitterstorms and the like.

May not be a complete disaster, but the Times (and the Gazette, and the Post) they are a'changin.

Re:The real question

[vlm]

I cannot speak for grandparent, but some options for premium content or pay advantages could be ad-free viewing, a convenient search function, access to older articles and/or larger background articles.

Ability to bookmark and permanently save "favorite articles". Ability to "like" on facebook or whatever. Ability to comment blog, or even more valuable, filter comments to remove the idiots. Ability to suggest articles to friends / family. Ability to directly email the author, and possibly even get a response. Graphics displayed at 150 dpi instead of 50 dpi. Graphics displayed in full 24 bit color instead of monochrome. Ability to mod up and mod down articles (people will actually pay for the privilege of doing free quality control for you). Access to the purely "fun" non-news parts of the paper, like a really nice crossword puzzle interface or whatever it is people use dead tree newspapers for (I'm under 40, so I don't get newspapers and have no idea what to do with "yesterdays news, tomorrow"). All kinds of exciting ideas.

Or you could just block everyone, that being the express ticket to irrelevancy.

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

[TheJediGeek]

I log in every day. I also get mod points every 3 days like clock work. The big question is if you've ever meta moderated. That seems to be the big catalyst for mod points. Since I'm posting I guess I won't mod this thread.

Re:The real question

[Ephemeriis]

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?

Except that the content maker isn't entitled to anything.

Just because you make content doesn't mean I have to give you money. I'm not going to mail a check to Stephen King just because he's written a new novel. I'm only going to give you money if I decide your content is worth it. How exactly that works varies somewhat from one medium to the next... Maybe you show me some previews and I decide to pay for a ticket to go see your movie. Or maybe I read the first few pages or chapter of your book and then decide to buy the thing. Or maybe I'm so thrilled with the content of your blog that I donate some money to you. But just turning out content doesn't entitle you to anything at all.

Generally speaking, I block ads. It isn't because I'm a malicious asshole that wants to see the entire web publishing industry fall down and die - it's because I don't want to waste my bandwidth loading advertising that I'm not going to look at anyway.

If I like a site enough, and there isn't some handy way to subscribe or donate, I'll enable ads on that site. But I'll disable them again if they're too annoying. Google adword blocks are great, I hardly even notice them. Flashing, animated, audible banner crap is not great - I'll disable that shit in a heartbeat.

If the sites I peruse don't like that, they don't have to put up with it. It's their choice. They can hide behind a paywall if they want to. And if I care enough about the site - if the content they offer is genuinely unique and useful and interesting - I might just pay for it. But if I can get that content elsewhere, without the annoying ads or without having to subscribe or whatever else, I'm going to.

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

[apoc.famine]

Was this your answer to what 'premium' content The Times should offer its readers?

There are lots and lots of options here...off the top of my head:

1) Access to every article of every edition. If someone comes unsubscribed from a Google link, they get the story they are looking for. Maybe the day's headlines. But that's it. Subscribers can get access to it all.
2) Links between articles, followup stories, categories to browse. Read an article on Xe Services LLC? Subscribers get a list of stories to pick from that go back years, including the name change (Blackwater Worldwide, for those that don't know) and all the controversy they've had.
3) Sudoku, crossword, all the rest of the semi-interactive entertainment
4) The ability to comment, perhaps?
5) Indexed, searchable, bookmarkable, clickable classified. Let anyone browse them like a paper. Give your subscribers beefed up tools to manage them.
6) Stock ticker links to company profiles, all the stories ever run about them, stock histories, etc. Again, let the non-subscribers see them like a newspaper page - static bits of information.
7) Set your website up like a newspaper for non-subscribers. Let them turn pages, navigate to page 6 to keep on reading. Give your subscribers links. Or "whole article on one page".
8) Links to every company, sports team, organization noted in your news for subscribers. Non-subscribers will need to google it.

There are lots of ways to still provide your information, but make it worthwhile for people to pay a little money. Many of these wouldn't be hard to code up templates for once. After that, you just publish your information as usual, and you automagically have benefits for subscribers, yet aren't pushing people away. And it shouldn't cost a ton of money to do so. Now, will everyone want to pay for these perks? Hell no. But I bet they'd get more money than they are getting now, with the dual failing options of "free" and "paywall".

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

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Get a referrer spoofer like refcontrol and set it to make all nytimes.com URLs get a referrer of http://google.com/ and you won't have those problems. Been doing it for years.

Re:The real question

[16K Ram Pack]

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.

You've never run a Google Ad campaign then.

Online ads are precisely the reason why old media are suffering. Google has produced flexible, cheap, more directly targetted and trackable advertising than newspapers could offer.

I ran a campaign for a client as a test and the results were staggering in terms of reduced costs. For every $1 of ad spend on Google, we got 5 times the result of newspaper ads. We targetted specific sites which were about the interests of our target market. We targetted keywords on Google, and we did a smidgen of Adsense too.

You might not click and you might block, but most people don't.

Re:The real question

[harl]

I don't have a problem with ads. I have a problem with scripts. So I run a script blocker.

It just happens to have the the side effect of blocking many ads.

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.

Re:The real question

[kyrio]

I get so many mod points I don't know what to do with them. I am always logged in and I visit a couple of times a day. I meta-mod when I remember to do so.

According to Private Eye (UK magazine)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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?

[elrous0]

Yeah, but that's only true 20% of the time.

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.

Re:10% remains?

[TheRaven64]

That's what I was thinking too. The numbers we had when they announced it said that they needed to keep 1% of the readership for it to remain as profitable as before. Keeping 10% means they're making a lot more money than they were.

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...)

Re:Figures are good for them

[hedwards]

You mean until the novelty wears off and people realize that they're getting screwed. The print customers with free access which is presumably the majority aren't actually paying anything for the privilege, so most likely it isn't going to fly. Especially when people start to figure out that they've been had.

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:It's like parking

[vlm]

Amusingly, you've described the fifty year old "shopping downtown vs shopping in the suburbs" problem and believe it or not, people still claim to "not understand" why retail is dying downtown, and will come up with all kinds of insane justifications to avoid thinking about that simple fact. Maybe the problem is lack of scrapbooking and candle stores? Or we need wider sidewalks? No, it must be the use of plastic bags instead of requiring only "green" paper bags. Anything to avoid thinking about reality.

Since that insane dance of justification to avoid reality has been going on for about half a century in the USA, I would expect that the same class of fools will be promoting internet paywalls half a century from now.

Declining fast, apparently...

[Nick Fel]

Because two days earlier, the very same newspaper reported they'd only lost 66% of their readership.

Paywall

[somaTh]

I tried reading the article from the NY Times itself, but it's behind a paywall.

Re:Paywall

[smallfries]

Err.... WTF?

What kind of crack are you smoking? This story is not about the NYT, and the NYT does not have a paywall (registration is free). Did you think that you could make some kind of point by cobbling together words that you felt were related to the story?

Re:Paywall

[jmichaelg]

He's smoking some ambiguity crack. That's the kind that lets you make a joke based on an ambiguity that leaves open an alternative interpretation to a discussion. For example...

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.

Broken record

[sircastor]

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.

Sometimes some are too early (premium content)

[beh]

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...

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

I tried to.....

[moodel]

....... 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.

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.

Slashdot readers are missing the point!

[dawilcox]

This comment (and most comments posted here) seem to fail to address the real purpose of the Times.

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.

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.

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.

Clearing out the riff-raff

[smeette]

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.

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).

"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.

*Looks* like a success, actually

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Free online NYT access led me to subscribe

[Faizdog]

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.

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

[Galactic Dominator]

Exactly when did any consumer ask for advertising? Inconvenience is the point. It's basically the same process that makes shady salesmen successful financially.

I agree those are quite annoying, but they do them for a reason -- it works. Maybe not on you or I or a lot of people, but enough to justify it.

That's why supporting models like adwords is ?good?, and I mean buying not just clicking. Advertisers see they get much better conversion rates from suggestions to interested parties rather than Matthew Lesko style ads.

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

[brackishboy]

That's terrible advice. I serve those ad banners from my localhost, you insensitive clod!

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.

mooch and get creative!

[zelik]

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.

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.