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?"

Comments

BBC vs Murdoch

[mccalli]

'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

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[ledow]

Technically accurate. However, the 20+ million pageviews that they have DEFINITELY lost is an awful lot of ad revenue to miss out on. Their paywall statistics include paper-subscribers, trial-subscribers, one-off subscribers, reporters who subscribed so they could accurately report on the new system, etc. so are nowhere near 200,000 "regular subscribers" at £1 / day or £2 / week (so assume £10 a month per person on average, for 75,000 actual online users to be really generous? 750k a month? What do Google ads pay for 20+ million pageviews a month? I'm guessing as much, if not more, and the paper in question always commanded some extraordinarily high advertising rates because of its readership).

It *sounds* to me like "Look, we were right, it works!" when in fact it's more of a "It wasn't a complete loss, for our particular (high-earning) readership, at the start, if we count all our paper subscribers who get it free anyway, and we have no idea what'll happen next year." It's doubtful that any other papers could or would follow this model, at that was much more of the point of this exercise - it was an attempt to "normalise" online-paywalls as the access for a newspaper.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[ledow]

It's not as simple as that.

Someone who, for one single day, paid £1 to view one single article to see how it worked is classed the same as someone who has a regular paper subscription for the last 30 years (because paper subscribers get online subscriptions for free), who is classed the same as someone who specifically signed up to the online version only, etc.

£1 a day, £2 a week, and lots of variations in between. The number of "subscribers" is irrelevant - it's the type and price of those subscriptions and their regularity. Besides, I expect the majority of their first "four months" published income to be heavily biased towards the first month... they might have made a complete loss for the three after that! Give it a year, see if they are still operating the same system.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[Hylandr]

Not exactly.

In radio, studios will have employee's call in to new shows pretending to be the average Joe in order to create the impression of an active product. Newspapers in this respect are no different, in beefing up the numbers.

Everyone needs to keep in mind that anything heard on the radio, seen on the TV or read in print belongs to the entertainment industry.

- Dan.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[dbIII]

His newspapers bleed money anyway and are probably worth less in total than the money Murdoch made a few months ago from selling a Chinese TV network. Any money made at all from the paywall sites is just a byproduct of a game to make it look as if the BBC, Google etc are stealing from him and destroying jobs.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[afidel]

Sorry, but I'd rather have a monopoly that points me to many free sources of news and opinion than pay cash to a muckraker.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[dorre]

I will start by declaring my reason for my previous post.
I want to read good articles about interesting topics. I want the journalist to write exhaustively on a subject and present it with his analysis, where it is clearly stated what he has found and what are his analysis of the topic. I also want to be a good writer so it is interesting to read.

My point here is that we need to look at what kind of news/articles can we expect from a news paper with different kinds of rewarding systems.
As far as I know, ad-revenue is generated on per-click basis. So the incentive here is that a news paper would want to appeal to a 'furious clicker'.
Basically, a news paper can earn more if they dilute all the good articles with a lot of shitty contents about paris hilton. You have to click through ten articles before you find something you want to read, instead of directly understanding what a story is about. Without clicking on it.
click-click-click vs. click is 3x profit vs 1x profit

I am prepared to pay to read interesting news not diluted with shit because to some extent I value my time.
Basically I think the ad system sucks, because you want to make content that attracts visitors to click, instead of articles that interest people.
Think of a big boobed blonde attention whore vs. a cute smart girl that's interesting to talk to (and also sleep with!).

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[dorre]

While I agree that for now Wikileaks is a very important information distributor, I think it would be a mistake to start depending on them. I think it would be too easy for someone with malicious intentions to publish false documents through them and get them taken seriously.
I hope their ideals spread back to the 'real' press.

But for now:
Go wikileaks!

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[postbigbang]

And they'll wither on the vine unless you start sending in much needed cash for their operation. It's also a political statement about freedom of information.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[ColdWetDog]

Yeah, sorry for that. I've been working on my thesis presentation (powerpoint) so long that I thought the normal way of writing means writing things really simple and presenting all their using bullet points... Anyway, I'm not a native English speaker. So you don't have to get depressed. (You're welcome!)

You are doing a thesis presentation with POWERPOINT?

May God have mercy on you soul.

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[demonbug]

I strongly advocate people paying to support quality journalism.

That's why I sent £50 to Wikileaks, and think you should too.

Can you point to the journalism that wikileaks has performed? As far as I can tell they just publish source documents that people send to them, they don't do any actual journalism.

Not that it isn't important; I just don't see it as journalism.

Since it's a Murdoch holding....

[sethstorm]

...nothing of value was lost.

Re:Since it's a Murdoch holding....

[Xest]

Indeed, even if it is profitable, then it's still a plus that there's 87% less people reading that crap.

Another question

[drinkypoo]

How many of these people are going to pay again?

Erosion of publishers & distribution chains

[Rivalz]

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.

Re:Erosion of publishers & distribution chains

[jfruhlinger]

News organizations provide a lot more "value" to reporters than just physical distribution. There is a whole editorial infrastructure in place to make the stories better -- fact checkers and copy editors to make sure the stories are well-written and not wildly off-base, and assignment editors whose job is to have sense of what the big stories are nudge reporters in the right directions. Many of these support editors have decades of experience in the region being covered, know the people who need to be called, can connect a current story with longer-term themes, etc.

Then there's the ad sales people whose existence helps insulate the journalists from potential conflicts of interest (if you're both reporting and selling ads, are you objective and believable?). And of course there's the fact that a large news organization is a pool of capital that allows news reporters to draw a steady paycheck/get benefits rather than just living ad sale to ad sale, which helps convince journalists to remain journalists instead of getting into a more lucrative line of work.

Journalism is changing and should change radically in the coming years. And in fact in the drive to cut costs many news organizations have been removing just the sort of infrastructure I described (which strikes me as silly because it's what differentiates them from dude-with-a-blog competiton). But to say that the only thing a news org offers to a journalist is "distribution" is silly.

Re:No longer relevant

[bbtom]

The point that vlm was making was that since such a small proportion of the Internet is subscribed to The Times, it must be a failure.

Getting 100,000 subscribers online is - if true - no bad thing. The top-selling broadsheet (Daily Telegraph) in Britain has a daily circulation of 691k. The Times itself has a 508k circulation. vlm is wrong to compare the subscriber numbers to the Internet as a whole: instead, you need to compare it with the UK broadsheet market. Because, really, all they need to do is cover their costs online. Anything else is profit, since they already have an existing offline newspaper business.

The problem is that it is doubtful whether they have got 100,000 subscribers: someone spending £1 trying out the paywall for a day is not necessarily someone who will then continue paying.

To see whether or not it has turned out to be a success, we need to wait until there are figures counting the subscribers once things have settled down and compare them with their own business objectives. It's a business: subscriber numbers don't matter, profit matters.

Re:But you are the one left sitting in the dark.

[bbtom]

Surely, the FT over the Times for financial news and info?

Re:Self-fulfilling obscurity

[hedwards]

Indeed, he damages every market he enters. I do think that the US needs rules on media ownership precisely to prevent corporations like Newscorp from having an undue influence on politics. There's been way too much consolidation of media outlets and it's really hurt politics.

Re:But you are the one left sitting in the dark.

[VJ42]

The Times remains the leading financial paper in the U.K.

Nope, that'd be the Financial Times(IIRC owned by Pearson PLC) is a financial paper, not The Times(owned by News International) which is a normal daily newspaper.

Re:But you are the one left sitting in the dark.

[DrXym]

The Times carries pretty much the same level of market coverage as other broadsheets. I'm sure it's an interesting read but it would be the Financial Times (which uniquely is printed on pink paper) that market people would read the most. Notably the electronic version is already partially behind a paywall, but then again it has unique content that specialist people want to read and the general public can do without or find alternatives for.