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Times Paywall In Questionable 'Success'
takowl writes "It's been a few months since The Times newspaper in the UK (part of the Murdoch stable) hid its online stories behind a paywall. The media watched eagerly to see if people would pay for news online. Now The Times has uncovered its first results: some 105,000 have coughed up online, and another 100,000 print subscribers have access. Naturally, the paper is keen to promote this as a success: some people are willing to pay. The BBC's technology correspondent, on the other hand, reckons: 'it's safe to assume that Times Newspapers has yet to achieve the same revenues from its paywall experiment that were available when its website was free.' Will online subscribers help the Times survive? Will other papers follow its lead?"
'The BBC's technology correspondent, on the other hand, reckons: "it's safe to assume that Times Newspapers has yet to achieve the same revenues from its paywall experiment that were available when its website was free."'
No it isn't. It's possible to believe it (and so do I) but it's not safe to assume anything. Data please.
Cheers,
Ian
of Murdoch tat.
Probably a good demographic for advertisers to tap within the Great Firewall of Murdoch.
OTOH, I'm not missing access to the Times one little bit.
...nothing of value was lost.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
How many of these people are going to pay again?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did they take tips from June Maxam?
These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats
If 0.1% of a country being willing to pay for it can be considered a success for a major newspaper..
Again, just post a Donate button on your website, whatever it is. Those who use it and have lots of disposable income can donate.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I haven't had any reason to read the Times since nobody links to their articles any more. And since I have no reason to read the Times, I haven't had any reason to pay for it.
Because of the very negative political effects that Murdoch's money and influence is having both here (where The Sun newspaper has become a kingmaker in British politics and in the US and other countries), I rather object to giving money to Murdoch's companies. I'm very glad we have stopped paying for Sky, for instance - there's enough crap to watch on Freeview/Freesat without paying £40 a Murdoch to watch repeats littered with adverts.
Save democracy: starve the Murdoch beast!
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
About a billion people are more or less on the internet. That being 1e9.
The Times count it a success that 1e5 or so people signed up.
Only about 1 in 10000 people even theoretically can access their site.
Not very impressive.
I suppose other newspapers could try to "compete" by shutting off their webservers 99.999% of the time.
Another way to compare, is TV shows get canceled when their market viewer share drops to something like a hundred times the Times market share.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
This is because they spent millions on advertising and offered a cheap introductory subscription. Only avid readers of shitty Murdoch publications would be convinced by the "success" story.
Terry Jones has called off his plans to burn a copy of The Times at Ground Zero tomorrow, after the paywall caught alight for half an hour on Friday afternoon.
Jones had planned to burn The Times because, he claimed, Rupert Murdoch would not rest until he had paywalled all of Google, including the remarkably lucrative Monty Python channel on YouTube. However, he was "rethinking" his plans after approximately everyone in the whole world suggested that just because it was legal might not actually make it a very good idea.
"We have made a deal with the thirty-three journalists still trapped down in the newspaper," he said. "They will come out and Caitlin Moran will publicly recant her idiot piece from a few months ago about what an excellent idea the paywall was and how enormously pleased she was to be stuck behind it. Oh, didn't you read that?"
The journalists have been trapped down the shaft since the first of July, and are being dribbled readers through a straw to keep them alive and focused and make them think there's a point to being there.
"Of course, failing a recantation there will be a paywall conflagration that reaches the skies. All those lovely theoretical readers disappearing in a cloud of soot and cement dust! But I'm sure it'll hardly be noticed and no-one will be upset."
The "newspaper" was an ancient form of information distribution using cellulose pulp from crunched-up trees. It was popular in the early days of Google, when users would send written requests to the company enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope and receive a reading list to take to their library, with an advertising flyer also enclosed.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think it is natural that the media conglomerates built on the old publish and distribute business plan are going to have to compete directly against the journalists they normally employ.
Cost of publishing is now next to nothing, cost of distribution is now next to nothing. So what services does a Media company like The Times offer it's employee's to entice them from not competing directly against the company?
Forget about people not being willing to pay for a daily dose of articles that they may not ever read. That shouldn't be concerning Media Moguls. What should be worrying them is what is going to stop their talent from a mass exodus and compete against the company.
Whatever I think of The Times Or Murdoch himself, I'm glad that it's a success. Why? Because in the future, it gives not just big publishers, but small websites a chance in the future to earn through another channel (through nano/micro payments) rather than rely on advertising all the time.
And yes, it's stuff like that can help get rid of adverts. I suppose very few of the people who hate the idea of a low-cost paywall actually own a website which they at least update from time to time.
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Whereas movie industry has large theaters and music industry has stadiums where they can recoup losses related to pirating of digital content, newspaper have nothing like that and it seems like it's their biggest problem. Good newspapers often have unique content or in-depth investigations, but most people are content with superficial sometimes even factually incorrect information.
Meanwhile paywall doesn't solve the aforementioned issue, it only sieves your readers and leaves the most dedicated ones. At the same time I still wonder what's more profitable - to leave your doors open and fill your website with ads or close your website with a paywall. If paywall allows a newspaper to be more profitable than without it, I see absolutely no problem here. Journalists, numerous personnel, rental payment - running a newspaper business is a costly affair.
Does this matter? most of the news today, online of online, has little or no absolute value, it is just sensationalism and about making money. One, two, hundreds of newspapers disappeared: who cares?
Under Firefox I get Times Error, under Chrome I get the registration page ..
How many people used to read it before? That's the only real measure of success, and we're not being told.
No sig today...
...nothing of value was lost.
That depends on who his readers are and where their influence will be most felt.
The WSJ is an early and successsful example of a paywall. The WSJ was merged into News Corp in 2007. The newspaper or magazine that is considered a must-read by decision makers in business and government is never safe to ignore.
By moving to a subscription model a lot of this dependency on the capriciousness of one single, search engine with less than transparent business practices has been removed - or at least hugely reduced. That in itself has got to be worth something in terms of hardening your company against unwelcome weaknesses. I guess the newspaper still has some dependency on search results to maintain its online marketing, but it must be in a less vulnerable position than its competition.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
A newspaper may, in the end, make money largely through advertising, and to a lesser extent from subscriptions. Economy of scale has a lot of importance here - bit companies will be tens of thousands for a large, well placed advertisement.
How is the "talent" supposed to make money without the newspaper? A few click-throughs on a couple of Google ads are not going to replace the salary paid by a newspaper or magazine.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I haven't had any reason to read the Times since nobody links to their articles any more. And since I have no reason to read the Times, I haven't had any reason to pay for it.
The Times remains the leading financial paper in the U.K. - as the WSJ - also News Corp - remains the leading financial paper in the U.S. You may not be reading the WSJ and Times - but some very big decisions are made by those who do.
Times Paywall In Questionable 'success'
The Times paywall is designed to be used inside a questionable success?
Shouldn't the headline be "Times' Paywall of Questionable Success"? That is, an apostrophe denoting that it's a paywall for The Times, and no scare quotes around success. If scare quotes are desired, then questionable is redundant: "Times' Paywall a 'Success'". That communicates skepticism of its supposed success. Using questionable and scare quotes technically communicates the opposite, that you find the questionability itself questionable.
Except the vast majority of those 100k are on the 'introductory trial offer', and thus can't really be counted on to continue providing revenue. They've put millions into advertising and padded their numbers with these deals. I want to know how many people are actually paying the full rate for the online version, and how much actual money they are making from this. Until that's established this is just a meaningless statistic.
TalkTalk probably made some numbers since they are pushing six months for the price of one for times subscription to all their broadband consumers in all their bills to them.
I just deleted my bookmark to the Times (I miss Jeremy Clarkson) and after two seconds of searching found Telegraph.co.uk. Done.
Times loses.
BTW with the massive expat community around the world 100,000 subscribers is nothing.
... reading the stories on the NYT website. I will not even sign up for the free account to read the news. I will simply go somewhere else. I am anticipated when Google news allows me to filter the times out of the Google news feed. I hope that other papers do not follow this lead.
No, yes, no and no, in that order.
I expect that those who paid are probably not as tech savy as other readers. As more people become more internet literate I expect this population that was willing to pay will decrease over time.
I can't independently verify its success, it's hidden by a paywall.
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
I'm with TalkTalk as an ISP.
Last month they had a free "gift" to us all of a £1 subscription for The Times for 3 months.
So the real quesiton is... regardless of the 100k+ subscribers... how much raw, hard cash did they see?
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YES ON 19 BE A STONE AT WORK
The reason for charging for subscriptions and at the news stand was to determine readership metrics. It was a very good model, as people would only pay money to buy something that they where interested in, so the more people you had buying something the more readers you had, and thus the more you could charge for your ad space. This was a simple model, which Murdoch understood.
Newspapers and most lay periodicals (technical/professional/trade journals and consumer reports not-so-much) for decades have made almost all their money from Advertising. Advertising boycotts have previously had a major editorial impact on the Media. Charging people for print subscriptions is basically a mechanism to track and understand readership dynamics, and to understand how much ad space is worth. Now, with the internet, we get much more detailed metrics directly on what people are reading on our websites, and what they are not, and what the space is worth, which is basically volume driven now, price-per-view, and price-per- click. So the metrics of what people are willing to pay for to read is basically redundant, because why would I pay for something, when I can get it (better) for free?
As before it matters how many people look at something, but now also on how many people directly act on that ad. Page 3 ad's have always been the most expensive, because the most people look at those ad's, but we would only have a rough idea on conversion. Now we can put an ad on a website, a person can click through and buy something--obviously the most case scenario from an advertisers point of view, and now very easy to measure the success or failure on for everyone involved, or they can ignore the ad, and we'll hope that they might come back someday.
From a print sense, Murdoch is basically imposing an Advert boycott on himself, which is insane from a business point of view.
The paywall is a complete failure, both in the sense of Murdoch's understanding of what IT is--how information is now created and consumed--and the real sense on how best run his business. Being an information reseller, as that what Murdoch is, is now much more nuanced, and finely grained. It's not this simple equation of how many readers I equals how much I can charge for ad-space, but how many people I can get to click through.
Perhaps the real reason is that Murdoch is trying to get a larger cut from Google/MS/Yahoo for adspace, as he thinks his ad-space is more valuable than Joe-blogger. Or perhaps Grandpa Murdoch doesn't get it. Either-way, my view is that paywalls will actually increase diversity, and increase traffic to independent media sources, so in some sense, I'm all for paywalls, as sites that put their content behind pay-walls won't get indexed by search engines, and then will be come irrelevant.
I can't wait for a paywall on Myspace!
If all the papers I currently read for free are behind paywalls, I'll need to make some tough choices.
I browse the NY Times once a day, read the Globe and Mail, and scan the Vancouver Sun.
If all suddenly required me to pay (and the NY Times is going this route, I believe), and it wasn't too onerous, I would stick with the latter two, but if the cost per paper per month was greater than $10, I would just read the G&M.
I suspect there are just a few paywalls, then people will just move to the free sites. But if all the high quality journalism is behind a paywall, I suspect people will read less, and pay for it.
I am sure that's what R. Murdoch is hoping.
So if you think you can just jump to another free online newspaper, what would you do if they all charged for access?
The fact is Murdoch has committed himself to this paywall and it has to succeed no matter what (in his eyes)! Those of us living in any major uk city have seen the big billboards and everyone has seen the hugely expensive ad campaigns trying to convince us that somehow the mere presence of Rupert Everett is enough to get us to part with our cash. But the days of paid for content are over, at least for the news industry. The sooner he fails the sooner we can forget about it... he has deep pockets and a huge ego though!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Here's an article from Tech Crunch that gives an indication of the profitability of the experiment.
Seems to me that the move was not a questionable success, but an outright success.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
I've spent hundreds a month for years on my very niche bingo card generating site. You better believe that I monitor the ROI on the campaign.
Google AdWords is excellent for my needs. When the site launched, naturally it was nowhere to be found on the search results. I paid for 95% of the visits. How do you rise to the top of the search results if no one can find you?
I still run the ad campaigns, at roughly the same dollar value, but the majority of the traffic is now non-paid from searches or direct entry.
Is it possible that the site would have gotten backlinks and risen towards the top of it's important search terms w/o buying ads? Sure... eventually. But buying traffic was faster, years faster.
Is it like a "horseless carriage?"