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

Re:BBC vs Murdoch

[Bigjeff5]

They expected to lose 90% of readers (i.e. those who go beyond the headlines on the first page and actually read the stories deeper in the site), not visitors to their front page. They lost 87% of visitors.

Nielsen puts The NYT UK's readership before the paywall at 3 million (that's actual readers, not just visitors, they measure it the same way they do TV ratings). 100,000 out of 3 million is 3%, or a 97% loss in readership.

It's an epic failure that they are trying to spin as a success in order to save face.

It's hard to compare it to their ad revenues before the paywall since they haven't released them (and probably never will, now), but given the fact that other online papers in the UK like The Guardian have ad revenues of around 40 million, The NYT UK's projected 10 million subscription revenue isn't very impressive, especially for being one of the largest most respected newspapers in the world.