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