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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?"
...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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
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.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
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.
Surely, the FT over the Times for financial news and info?
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
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.
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.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
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.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.