The Times Erects a Paywall, Plays Double Or Quits 344
Posted
by
timothy
from the testing-what-the-market-will-bear dept.
from the testing-what-the-market-will-bear dept.
DCFC writes "News International, owners of The Times and The Sunday Times announced today that from June readers will be required to pay £1 per day or £2 per week to access content. Rupert Murdoch is delivering on his threat to make readers pay, and is trying out this experiment with the most important titles in his portfolio. No one knows if this will work — there is no consensus on whether it is a good or bad thing for the industry, but be very clear that if it succeeds every one of his competitors will follow. Murdoch has the luxury of a deep and wide business, so he can push this harder than any company that has to rely upon one or two titles for revenue."
I predict... (Score:5, Insightful)
"And nothing of value was lost..." (Score:5, Insightful)
This is good. Two of Murdoch's outlets have deliberately isolated themselves from the wider discussion. I only wish he'd adopt this strategy more widely.
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, you're not much of a mathematician, are you?
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong argument.
First of all you are not part of the target audience. You won't pay, the sheep will.
Information must originate from somewhere and somebody has to pay for it.
Murdochs media imperium is big enough that it will not fall in 5 years. He can suffer from 2-3 years of lower income, his treasure chest holds enough cash. He will get ROI on this scheme and other media outlets will follow suit. ACTA and DMCA will of course help with this.
You may not be happy with this course of events, but unless you are Bill Gates and have enough cash to burn on providing the information and the opinions wanted by your target audience, what will you do, if all links to the information you need and want are behind this paywalls?
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:3, Insightful)
He couldn't have made it clear that he is an adult film producer. Also, mathematics and accounting are widely and wildly different, and it would take a state school system to confuse the two. Mathematics is the formal analysis of patterns; accounting is adding numbers up. While a mathematician would be able to improve the art of accountancy, he might never be a good accountant, just as the guy who builds the jet might make a poor pilot.
Your rule of thumb: if you have an operation which would be made easier with a numerical calculating machine, you are probably not doing mathematics.
The Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully, the Guardian [guardian.co.uk], which has far superior journalism and doesn't seek to ram politics down everyone's throats in "news" stories like News International's papers do (people often talk of the paper being liberal, which on its comments pages is largely true, but they do a good job of keeping it out of their news reporting), remains free for everyone with an extensive back archive. And of course the BBC exists too... thank God.
I can only echo the poster above who said he hopes Murdoch puts up more paywalls. Murdoch's shitty reporting and deliberately biased and bigoted publications have ruined political discourse in this country.
Don't underestimate them. (Score:1, Insightful)
People underestimate Murdoch at their peril. He isn't an idiot, even if he did invest in MySpace. This will work, unfortunately.
He isn't expecting people to pay £1/day or £2/week for the content that is available right now on timesonline.co.uk; they've recognised that they're going to need to offer something that no other free news source can. If by subscribing I get to ask questions in a live Q&A with, say, political analysts or MPs (or whoever, idk...) and also access to whatever else they happen to have lined up, then that is something a lot of people in their target readership are likely to go for. The success of this will be decided on the quality and *perceived* value of the extra content.
Interestingly, the same thing is happening with the Sun and News of the World sites.
8 pounds a month (Score:5, Insightful)
8 pounds a month, a lot less isn't it? But I think it is the 1 pound per day that people will indeed choke on.
I don't really read news sites myself, I read stories that I found links to. But I don't really go to a newspaper site and just read all the stories. So it would be NOT 1 pound per day, but 1 pound per article. So I just wouldn't.
And because I follow links to several sites, it is also not 1 buck per day, but maybe 20 bucks for all the different sites. And that does hurt, even if you take a monthly subscription.
That is the biggest reason I think this will fail.
People use the net different then a newspaper. When you take a newspaper subscription, you read it like a book. But when you browse the net, you go here you go there. Take in a page here, an article there. The problem isn't paying 1 subscription fee, it is paying dozens.
Lets see, 1 euro for slashdot, 1 for tweakers, 1 for comics.com, 1 for penny-arcade, 1 for the bbc, 1 for the times, 1 for the new york times, etc etc. That is going to hurt pretty fast.
True micro-payments would help, but the amounts would have to be truly tiny. As in a tenth of a cent for an article and that is never going to work.
And anyway, I don't have a credit card and the only Americans who have ever heard of Global Collect are Sony (SOE is the only MMO company in the world to support iDeal (dutch banks) and other countries payment systems (this might have changed in recent years)). So how am I going to pay even if I wanted to. (Oh and for irony, supporting iDeal is cheaper per transaction then credit card payments).
The Dream and The Reality (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins. And my gut is that there is a large percentage of Murdoch's readership who can't stomach his competition any more than you can imagine yourself watching Foxnews, and that this percentage of folks will pay. He doesn't need everyone who's reading him now to pay, just -- what's the percentage being kicked around? -- 5% or such? He gets that, he makes money, and more importantly, he trumpets that "The Paywall is a resounding success!" (Using the largest megaphone in the land, I might add.) This all but forces his competition to follow suit (let's call them the Hipster Papers...), and you know that the hipsters aren't going to pay, because, well, you're one of them, you've got your reasons. The Death Spiral of The Hipster Papers accelerates.
Murdoch may be one Nehru Jacket shy of being a Bond Villain, but he has thought this out. It is entirely possible that in the pending media apocalypse that is online news distribution, he's the last man standing.
Re:so, that's like $350/year (USD) ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, probably not. The "sheep" as you put it will probably just move to a non-paywalled news outlet. Or go back to buying dead tree versions. It's a path-of-least-resistance thing.
Some people will pay, certainly. Some always do. But how many people have a pressing need to see what the Times has to say on a minute by minute basis? What does the Times offer that they can't get elsewhere, for free? People are going to stay away in droves.
Well, yes. But it doesn't originate in factories. It's not like Murdoch has armies of gnomes painstakingly hammering scrap iron into bits and bytes. The information just needs to be collected.
But even setting that aside, it's still far from clear that a paywall will prove a successful business model for financing the collection of information. It didn't work at all for the New York Times IIRC. In fact as far as I can see, the only papers that have ever made a paywall work are the financial papers, and they have hefty corporate subscribers, and offer data that isn't quite so widely available.
True, but he's quite capable of stripping away what little relevance remains at the once-mighty Times. I mean Alexander Lebedev is most likely about to start distributing the print version of The Independent with a cover price of zero, and Murdoch's choosing this moment to engage in a course of action that is bound to drive away a large number of readers. There's no value in having a newspaper that no one reads.
From 'anchor of civilization' to wacko webpage (Score:5, Insightful)
Charging a pound a day to read news is ill-advised. It will transform this man's newspaper from being the anchor media of the community to being just another website for the rich and their wack-job worshipers.
Newspapers a hundred-years ago were the voice and rallying point of the many diverse communities in the USA and the voice of the middle class in Europe. There were many and each had strong and opposing editorial positions. After World War II the newspapers consolidated into a few major corporations and greatly softened their strident editorial positions. They started to become focused on local advertising, legal announcements, and providing a printed 'voice of record' for centralized government and corporate positions and viewpoints.
In the 1980s multiple papers and editions in cities disappeared. Most major cities had only one daily and one 'alternative' weekly for young adults. At the millennium, the function of providing news and advertisements started being done by the web and newspapers began to be perceived as irrelevant. A large number of people born after WWII hated their local established daily because the ultra-conservative editorial board would always take the wrong position on every single issue, year after year. Other middle-of-the-road young people found little in the daily that was useful to their lives. One by one, they stopped buying the local paper as the years went by. Editions of major city papers, NY Times, Washington Post, started being published in minor cities.
The wealthy loved the daily paper. They were deluded into believing that the conservative editorial positions were a manifestation of the political views of the people and not a paid reflection of their own perspectives. They poured millions into the dailys, year after year.
Then a few years ago, a tipping point happened. The amount of money coming in didn't pay the costs of the dailys. The papers went 'thin', losing 50-70% of their daily newsprint and concentrated on food ads, kittens-stuck-in-trees human-interest stories, obituaries, and comics. The young get the functions of a daily paper from the web and cable TV. The old feel just lost and the middle class/aged just don't care as long as the SUV still runs.
The global newspaper kings should make their news outlets and web sites free. The sources that they use to get the information are more interested in getting their positions out to the international public than they are interested in selling stories to newspapers. They will use focused web sites. Centralized 'journalism' will wither and just become a forgotten cultural characteristic of the 20th century. Murdock appears to be too old, too isolated, and too rich to understand this.
Re:The Guardian (Score:3, Insightful)
What people tend to forget is that any newsoutlet needs to pay for the content they deliver, either through paying journalists or through paying press agencies. Because newspapers do not get enough money from advertising, they currently need to let journalists go. Press agencies need to lower prices as well, because newspapers expect more for less. The current business model is not maintainable, everyone is losing. Most of all the readers, who are more and more getting the exact same news from any paper, without the indepth research we should be able to expect from journalists.
The current business model has to give, and this is a first step.
You may not like paying for your news, in the end someone has to pay for it...
They should value my attention (Score:3, Insightful)
What Murdoch and the rest of the 'Content Kings' don't get is that content is no longer king.
These guys should be happy that they are getting my attention - that I'm literally paying them attention. You want me to pay money on top of me paying attention? Forget it. The whole world has a press now and there are millions of people out there - with interesting or intelligent or entertaining or titillating or whatever content - that would be just happy for me to paying them attention.
Murdoch seems to be attempting to hypnotise the public into thinking we need his stuff so badly we'll be prepared to pay for it. We don't.
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't so much the amount involved, which is the same as buying the dead tree version, it is the fact that it is quicker to find another newspaper on the internet than it is to find your credit card and type all the details in, whereas in a newsagent, it is pretty easy to find a pound coin in your pocket and hand it over.
It'll work GREAT! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:3, Insightful)
at no additional charge.
unless you use them
The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, the "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) has excellent reporting and analysis. The WSJ is worth the price that its owners charge, so I willingly pay for a 1-year subscription to the WSJ.
Is "The Times" worth 1 pound per day? Only the market can say for sure.
An interesting but indirect conclusion of my observation is that if a newspaper is so rotten that only free content will attract readers, then the reporters and the editors of that rotten newspaper are being overpaid for the crappy work that they do.
Re:From 'anchor of civilization' to wacko webpage (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Dream and The Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
A lot of very vocal voices on the Internet hate Murdoch, and that's fine. But the reality is, his newspapers and cable channels are wildly popular -- WILDLY popular, at least in the US. They typically trounce their competition by silly-wide margins.
That's true in the UK newspaper business [guardian.co.uk], too. But his outlet that's doing that is The Sun (circ. ~2.9 million), not The Times (circ. ~600 thousand). You will note that he's not messing with his best-selling daily title, he's messing with his worst-selling daily title.
Why it won't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Due to the fact that "The Times" has quite a reputation, in the initial stage the scheme will be a relative success. As time goes by however, the paywall will show its ugly teeth. No more external links driving traffic and no more SERPs in Google.
Paywalls fail not because they make people pay, they fail because they effectively isolate the website from the rest of the web.
Re:Use the BBC (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect you are missing the point - this is an attack on the BBC. Firstly introduce payment for the Times etc. online. Get that established, then the next step will be to complain to Parliament and the press that the BBC is unfairly competing with his online offering, as it is giving away news that he has to charge for, and therefore the BBC News websites should be shut down. This has been his tactic to date (google for Murdoch, BBC and unfair if you want citations on this). Murdoch cannot stand genuine competition.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:5, Insightful)
The late unpleasantness was caused by the market correctly pricing financial derivatives. The market always works. It can take its own sweet time to correct itself, but you sure don't want to be standing in the way when it does.
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really read news sites myself, I read stories that I found links to. But I don't really go to a newspaper site and just read all the stories. So it would be NOT 1 pound per day, but 1 pound per article. So I just wouldn't.
That's the problem with paywalls these days... Most folks don't just go to a single site for their news.
Personally, I gather my information from a variety of aggregators like Slashdot, Reddit, Google News, and an assortment of blogs. I don't just go to a single news site and read everything they have to offer.
So I'd have to pay to access a half-dozen sites a day, if not more.
I suppose that maybe this is the intent... Make it too expensive to shop around for your information. Make it cheaper to go to a single source. So you don't read just a single article from The Times, you read pretty much everything there. And I assume there'll still be advertising all over the site.
Re:Use the BBC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Use the BBC (Score:5, Insightful)
If I had mod points....
This is completely true in my view. Murdoch hates the BBC. OK, fine. But he will use political presure to complain about unfair competition in, I reckon, 5 years.
It won't be Rupert Murdoch himself of course. It will be his rottweiller of a son who will get whichever government of the day to reduce the budget and scope of the BBC News website. It's not the beginning of the end but it is the beginning of the beginning of the end if you get my drift.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't "work," it imploded. Without government intervention, the banks would have gone out of business, and everybody would have lost their life's savings. Markets are not efficient nor even sustainable when their is either too much or too little regulation.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Insightful)
The market always works.
Now we just need a definition of "works".
Re:Use the BBC (Score:5, Insightful)
He's already complained loudly about the BBC and Australia's ABC/SBS "unfair advantage" but nobody is paying any attention to him since fucking with those institutions has always ended badly for politicians that have tried it in the past. It simply won't wash with the public in AU/UK, state sponsered media generally enjoys a much better reputation than the commercial offerings and has been around for well over 50yrs. Given that history it doesn't take a genius to work out that "unfair competition" from the BBC/ABC hasn't stopped him from becoming mega rich in the past.
Sure he's got friends in high places and is a strong influence on government policy in the western world but there are some things even Rupert can't change.
Re:Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
No
You see, here's the big problem that Murdoch and friends have with "free-news". The newspapers and magazines, can't get any kind of useful stats on it's users if they just give it away. They use this data in a bunch of ways, one is to supply it to their advertisers.
These guys just don't sell the news, they sell this data as well. It's probably more important to them than selling the news. If you use a credit card to purchase something, this has your full name, address, purchase history through lookup on other shared db's and so much more.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Insightful)
It didn't "work" because of those bailouts. Without them, a few large banks would have gone out of business and nobody would have lost their life savings, except investors in those banks! The surviving banks would have learned a harsh lesson about gambling.
My bank needed no federal handout to survive. Neither did my car company. The free market only works if idiots are allowed to fail. Otherwise, idiocy is simply propagated forever, which seems to be the current system.
Re:The market pays what a service is worth. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, both of them needed bailouts to survive, even if they didn't receive any directly. When a bank goes bust, everyone there loses their savings, therefore can't buy any cars. The banks who were owed money by that bank also go bust, and more companies go bust. Millions lose their jobs and default on their mortgages, the mortgages owned by your bank which also goes bust.
The problem with libertarianism is that its proponents have no understanding of economics and think they exist in a vacuum.
Re:8 pounds a month (Score:3, Insightful)
It cost them $4m dollars to set up the paywall.
It cost them $4 million dollars to set up a paywall? I think their problems run deeper than a lack of subscribers.
Re:Use the BBC (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not saying the BBC/ABC are untouchable but their history and the vigalance of the public does make them highly resiliant to politically inspired hatchet jobs.