Times Paywall Blocks 90% of Traffic 311
Jamie was one of several readers to note the not particularly surprising results of the recent Times switch to a pay-wall. Apparently a 90% drop in readership is the reward. But then again, if they are paying real money, it might still be ok for them. It doesn't look very good though.
According to Private Eye (UK magazine) (Score:2, Informative)
the voucher system for journalists to allow them access to the site did not work and they then had to set up paid for accounts. Depending on the numbers that would further distort the figures.
Declining fast, apparently... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Paywall (Score:5, Informative)
Err.... WTF?
What kind of crack are you smoking? This story is not about the NYT, and the NYT does not have a paywall (registration is free). Did you think that you could make some kind of point by cobbling together words that you felt were related to the story?
Re:Paywall (Score:4, Informative)
He's smoking some ambiguity crack. That's the kind that lets you make a joke based on an ambiguity that leaves open an alternative interpretation to a discussion. For example... [youtube.com]
Re:The real question (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And along those lines (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly when did any consumer ask for advertising? Inconvenience is the point. It's basically the same process that makes shady salesmen successful financially.
I agree those are quite annoying, but they do them for a reason -- it works. Maybe not on you or I or a lot of people, but enough to justify it.
That's why supporting models like adwords is ?good?, and I mean buying not just clicking. Advertisers see they get much better conversion rates from suggestions to interested parties rather than Matthew Lesko style ads.
The Times of LONDON, folks (Score:1, Informative)
This was the Times of LONDON, folks. UK. Britain. Other side of the Pond from The NY Times.
The NY Times did something akin to this to themselves years ago, and realized within a few years that their columnists plummeted from most-quoted status. Whereupon they backed off considerably.
My local smalltown newspaper's publisher prattles on endlessly about how un-broke his paywall model is and how it has to be that way or news won't survive. As a result, I google up equivalent stories when I need to share them. He's captaining the Titanic, IMHO. Tautologies and contradictions at every turn, mixed with a naive misunderstanding of copyright. Meanwhile, I *LIKE* newspapers & want to see them thrive. But I'm less sanguine that they will -- it's still looking like a train wreck in slo-mo.
mooch and get creative! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Clearing out the riff-raff (Score:1, Informative)
Therein lies the problem though. If I'm paying to access something, I'd damn well better have the ability to turn off advertisements if it isn't automatic already. I'm not paying extra money to download ads, when said ads were there to provide it free earlier.
Re:The real question (Score:3, Informative)
Get a referrer spoofer like refcontrol and set it to make all nytimes.com URLs get a referrer of http://google.com/ [google.com] and you won't have those problems. Been doing it for years.
Re:The real question (Score:2, Informative)
The main problem is that internet advertising sucks. The profit is from click-thrus, not page views, but no one clicks, your eyes basically ignore the ads and you move on to the actual text. Even without an ad-blocker people know to skip the top of the page to avoid banners and stay away from the margins. That's because they are flashy and filled with crap. They contain nothing useful for the reader. Newspaper ads are different, they have more connection to you and even contain useful information. That 1/2 page ad for a local car dealer gives you a general idea of local car prices, same for the real estate ads. The supermarket ad tells you what's on sale this week and gives you coupons. Even ads for local businesses that you will never use promote name recognition and form a sort of local directory in your head keeping you current on your community. The ads in newspapers are relevant to you, they actually form a part of the content of a newspaper. Internet ads have never done that. Google tried with adsense, but it never really works unless you're a lonely man with a small penis and erectile disfunction.
You've never run a Google Ad campaign then.
Online ads are precisely the reason why old media are suffering. Google has produced flexible, cheap, more directly targetted and trackable advertising than newspapers could offer.
I ran a campaign for a client as a test and the results were staggering in terms of reduced costs. For every $1 of ad spend on Google, we got 5 times the result of newspaper ads. We targetted specific sites which were about the interests of our target market. We targetted keywords on Google, and we did a smidgen of Adsense too.
You might not click and you might block, but most people don't.
Re:The real question (Score:4, Informative)