Times Paywall In Questionable 'Success' 214
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?"
Self-fulfilling obscurity (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
No longer relevant (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:No longer relevant (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that the right analogy though? Sure, if a advertising-funded (or, in Britain, a license-fee-payer-funded) show gets a small audience share, then it may get taken off air.
But I imagine that some of the porno channels that you have to pay a subscription for don't get many viewers. But so long as the viewers they have are paying enough to fund their whole operation, they don't really give a shit that they aren't getting the same number of viewers as Prison Break or whatever. (Same for premium non-porno channels.)
Re:BBC vs Murdoch (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:A good thing? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:BBC vs Murdoch (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:BBC vs Murdoch (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Erosion of publishers & distribution chains (Score:4, Interesting)
You missed an important one - news organizations also provide legal departments (good and bad). Bad in that legal sometimes quashes stories unnecessarily. But good in that they often will take a stand and publish something that could get them in hot water but legally in the clear.
Lone wolf reporters can easily get swamped with all sorts of lawsuits - despite anti-SLAPP and shield laws. Enforcing either takes lawyers and lots of money. And between paying for lawyers and having to attend court, it could easily put a reporter out of business.
Anyhow, I don't believe this story. They may have 100,000 paying subscribers, but they probably charged the same rates for the ads as they did when they were free. So they effectively earned 100,000 subscriptions without losing any money. Let's see the numbers after ad rates have been adjusted. Advertisers aren't stupid and they're tracking these things as well. It would be interesting to see if the subscribers have a higher click-through rate or not, and what advertisers are demanding for their dollar.
Re:BBC vs Murdoch (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Re:Looking beyond the numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [time.com]
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?
Re:Since it's a Murdoch holding.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how the contributors feel about this. I'm not too familiar with the times, but here in the U.S., we seem to be in the era of "synergy". Bill O'Reilly hosts a talk show every night. Once he built up a large audience of viewers, he signed a lucrative contract to host a radio show. Now, many of his night-time viewers will also listen, and much of the research that went into his night-time show can also carry over to the daytime show. Then, every year or two, he takes the research and opinions that he has been broadcasting over cable, radio, and the internet, and publishes them into a book. He then uses the book as a springboard to tour the talk show circuit promoting his it, and his show, on everything from Jay Leno, to Jon Stewart.
All this began from an opinion show on Fox News. If, ten years ago, he had lost 87% of his audience, would he be where he is today?
The real reason... they've been giving "trials" (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm with TalkTalk as an ISP.
Last month they had a free "gift" to us all of a £1 subscription for The Times for 3 months.
So the real quesiton is... regardless of the 100k+ subscribers... how much raw, hard cash did they see?