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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.'"
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."); }
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.
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.
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."); }
Actually, Its much funnier than that.
->unique visitors to its front page
only 100,000 went beyond that.
21million
to
100,000
means they lost 99.53% of their readers
And for those not in the UK, they've been slamming adverts on TV asking people to join, but we all know its google these days that drive visitors, and they've all but vanished from that.
Once you factor in attrition I'll give them 12 months left to live.
There are 105,000 paying subscribers. The rest are print subscribers who get free access to the website. Half of the paying subscribers use the iPad App at £10 per month less Apple's commission. From what I can see they are making about £10m per year in subscription revenue less billing costs compared to £22m in advertising revenue previously.
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."); }
Complete BS.
You don't need to pay Google anything.
(Yes, I realize this is an anecdote.)
My business (computer repair) was paying Google about $200/month for adwords. And it was poor targeting. Keywords & regions are it. For example, I couldn't have no ads on the weekends, and lots of ads on Monday. Even if I did it manually, the numbers changed gradually. So we decided to stop adwords since we weren't getting any real hits from it. Now, we get calls regularly from people who found us on Google. They seemed to be ignoring us if they saw us in adwords, but actually contact us if we're not in adwords. So we're more profitable AND have fewer expenses.
Tell me you don't subconsciously ignore businesses with excessive/annoying ads.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Why are the people interested in celebrity drivel when there's no paywall, and "quality content" when there is?
If they get hits when they post a big headline about paris hilton, means their costumers are looking for it, and providing "news" on what people are interested in is exactly what they need to get people to pay.
Dilbert RSS feed
What gatekeeper? There are plenty of news aggregators besides Google. In fact, we're posting in one of them right now! And all of them "work best" with unrestricted pages. In fact, the Web itself well before Google was designed like that.
What we need is a decent micropayment system, where I don't have to subscribe for a whole month to read a couple of articles, but alas, there's no decent system right now.
(Flattr is the closest thing, but it doesn't support fixed amounts, it always divides the whole "cake" for all the "things", which means an article might get $0.5 from someone and $2 for someone else, and I'm not sure the newspapers are OK with that).
Dilbert RSS feed
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
He has a mailing list of 105,000 gullible customers, who will pay money when they can get a superior product for free elsewhere.
That list alone must have some value!
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
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.