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?"
'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
...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.'"
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
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.
Yes because there is a history of those with a lot of money being prepared to give any of it away
22 million people used to read it before.
If you can't make money from ads, product endorsement, commission links and other things online (including companies directly approaching you trying to outbid your entire Google ad revenue), or your data isn't incredible precious and expensive (e.g. Ordnance Survey), you ain't *gonna* make money with charging to view a website. If you do, you could have made a LOT more by doing it another way. I'm not suggesting that The Times should team up with Cafepress and make a Times T-shirt, but the basic rule is that ads only work if you have exposure, and pay for that exposure, and if you don't have exposure it's impossible to make money from ads. But at the same time, when ads have good, public exposure, they make you an AWFUL lot of money (e.g. Superbowl ads).
My brother runs an extremely popular website (have to keep moving hosts because of bandwidth problems and it's only HTML/PNG/JPG's) that's funded entirely by Google ad revenue - he'd rather shut down the site than move it to a paywall because it would destroy the whole basis, community, reputation and income of the website. Related companies come to him now and say "we'll give you X amount of money just to put a link to us on your website". He has products sent to him for review. The offers have never once made more than he could through some Google ads, even after some tough negotiations - because the people who want to pay for advertising space can't compete with just asking Google to do it on related sites for them. Advertisers know their industry, which is about exposure, image, relevance and other things. People rarely pay YOU regularly for not doing very much but if the investment in quality is already there, advertising actually makes an awful lot of money, so much that even the biggest high street store can't afford to buy exclusivity.
If you can make money by someone paying you to do not very much, who also has to take their cut, probably multiple times, from a company who wants to be associated with your brand, why would you think that you can expect your CUSTOMERS to pay an equal amount plus profit to you directly? If that were true, advertisers would ALL be out of business. They aren't. They occasionally shift media but they very, very rarely abandon it. It's not that you CAN'T make money, it's that you're silly if there are lots of easier, still respected, legal, and industry-standard ways to make MORE money.
The problem is that people don't get the concept of having to be a quality link to make money from Google ads, and think they can do better by either a) gaming the links with substandard content, b) charging people for access to some information or c) reducing the quality and actually losing customers. And reputation matters. Anytime something goes from "Free" to "Paid" there's an associated loss of reputation. If you can't afford to give it away, why were you doing that last year or the year before?
Surely, the FT over the Times for financial news and info?
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WSJ was a unique newspaper. They were publishing unbiased, reliable, useful news, which is why so many people (including me) were willing to pay any reasonable price for it, certainly $150 a year. I don't think you say that about any other Murdoch publication (and I'm not sure you can say that about the WSJ any more). I'm not going to pay $150 a year (or anything) for right-wing propaganda.
The WSJ's news was as objective as humanly possible. Their news department had an independence from the advertising department and the publisher's personal causes that was legendary. The far right editorial page was a useful cover for reporters who were free to tell it like it is. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956896,00.html
For example, when General Motors threatened to withdraw all their advertising from the WSJ if they printed a story GM didn't like, the WSJ told GM to go fuck themselves. It was a long time, after GM finally came crawling back, before the WSJ let them advertise again.
The New York Times in contrast used to print puff pieces on for example the auto industry, because they were big advertisers, and the publisher used to promote his or her pet causes all the time. See Gay Talese's "The Kingdom and the Power" or Robert Moses' "The Power Broker."
Rupert Murdoch was willing to tell any lie, break any promise, or betray any trust to get a reputation for integrity. That's how he bought the WSJ.
Unfortunately, since Murdoch bought it, not only the integrity but the quality has gone down. In my reading, they don't always give both sides of the story they way they used to, doesn't always have the depth it used to, and now has a Republican tilt. According to the NYT, one of Murdoch's new editors in the Washington bureau was cutting out paragraphs that were favorable to Democrats and unfavorable to Republicans. You want me to pay for that?
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
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.
Again, Times != NYT. Is this really that hard, or is /. collectively just that dumb?