The Times will add Paywall in June

[Ben Thornton]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Just in the UK, Ben? I'd point out that BBC has extensive worldwide coverage, too...

(And of course the newspapers /are/ attacking the BBC licence fee, but fortunately that one falls flat, heh)

That's true, but the BBC is still UK centric - it's not really a viable replacement for, say, the Washington Post, for the locals. My point was that the position of UK papers is even worse than that of newspapers where there is no state-funded on-line news source.

The Times, in particular, seems to me to be a strange thing to want to charge for. I'd say that the leading "serious" papers are now the Torygraph and the Grauniad, so that if anyone could make a paywall work, they could. (Not that I think that either could, to be honest, although I'd miss the Grauniad on-line).

[DawnFalcon]

Local newspapers (and the WP's readership is essentially local, although quite a large "local" area) are not really in the same situation as national ones, though.

[charleski]

Of course, if you want free news, the KGB is always happy to provide it.

(The irony being that I'd far rather put money in Lebedev's pocket than Murdoch's.)

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

The value of a newspaper lies in its reputation and that only is maintained if the newspaper is seen and heard on a daily basis. Placing the majority of content behind a pay-wall degrades that reputation over time by being seen less.

A reputation can't be maintained if the newspaper in question goes out of business. And paywalls are rarely 100%, so the site can typically still be accessed enough to get indexed by search engines and news aggregators.

And you need to pay salaries with cash, not "reputation."

Also, papers and magazines like the WSJ, Financial Times, the Economist have used paywall for years without degradation to their reputations. NY Times plans to add one later this year as well; I doubt that change alone will alter its reputation.

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

But one principle ought to guide the bean counters: less is not necessarily more. Tread with caution and charge where you can add value to the consumer experience without hacking away at the foundations of the press itself.

Unless, of course, you have fewer readers with a more desirable demographic profile, whose subscription fees raise more revenue for the newspaper than online ads alone.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Then they're in trouble. It's been shown over and over on the web that you only get a very small minority of your users to subscribe when you're using a paywall, and citizen journalism can provide the vast majority of the news.

On paywalls, I wonder if it isn't a matter of presentation? Right now, you actually do seem to run into a wall if you go to, say, the Wall Street Journal site. You are there, but there's this screen in your way. Easy enough to run around it, of course, but the point it, the metaphor of a "wall" does seem appropriate.

But what is going to happen as we move into the Universe of Apps? The presentation changes - now what you do is make a selection of an App, which you purchase or rent for a period of time.

I read the WSJ at work each day, sharing a copy with several other people. It's inconvenient. For a while, I had my own subscription, but let it lapse in a cost cutting move when my wife retired. They keep sending me offers, reducing the price. It's down to about $100 a year now. If the WSJ puts together a decent iPad app for that price, I think I'll give in.

I've often wondered why Apple doesn't sell Apps to run on its computers. I could imagine News Apps selling pretty well.

People think that the web is free, and expect anything on it to be free. But they don't have the same expectations for Apps, so maybe that's a way out for newspapers. You buy the NYT app, and it is on your iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. It syncs across devices. It contains some kind of map or index that allows you to keep track of where you are in the app as you move from one article to another. It links to previous articles. It pushes News Flashes and Weather Updates. It allows you to archive articles, or email them to friends, or tweet them.

And yeah, you can do all that on the web, but the difference is that you have to hunt things down on the web, whereas a properly designed App could be tailormade to do it for you.

[basschick]

one problem with a "paywall" is that it will substantially lower the number of readers, and that's not going to please the advertisers. after all, who wants to pay the same to advertise on a website that has 1/10th or less of its original readers?

btw, in porn it's usually less than 1/80 who pay up - and that's at the inexpensive sites that have original content.

[DawnFalcon]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

Also, papers and magazines like the WSJ, Financial Times, the Economist have used paywall for years without degradation to their reputations.

Yes, now think about the names. They are not general papers, they're dealing with a specialist audience, which has cash to burn.


Harmon - For general news, I'm not willing to use any single source, which means any single paper is only of fractional worth to me (and many others) compared to a specialist rag. I'd be willing to pay for a good agent which handled getting my news according to my set specifications, but not the news itself per-se.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Harmon - For general news, I'm not willing to use any single source, which means any single paper is only of fractional worth to me (and many others) compared to a specialist rag. I'd be willing to pay for a good agent which handled getting my news according to my set specifications, but not the news itself per-se.

Yeah, I've thought about that, too. Particularly if you could use the agent to narrow down the parameters of what you want to read about.

I think, though, that this is just another example of a situation where what is being sold is the access & convenience - in this case, the convenience of someone else parsing the news and selecting relevant pieces.

Newspapers like to think that they are in the information business, but I think they are really in the service business. As you point out, people don't want to pay for information, per se, because they get it for free from all over the place. But they will pay for service - delivery, organization, editing, contexturalizing, cross-platform synchronization, cross-referencing, archiving, &c.

Actually, that's what newspapers used to do, but they seem to be unable to translate that service from the analog world to the digital world. Of course, in the analog world, that service seemed to be close to free, because advertising picked up most of the cost. Now papers have to charge more, so they need to deliver more. It seems to me, though, that there is more that can be delivered in the digital world, and not enough of it is actually being delivered.

[Conor]

Originally Posted by petermillard

You're kidding, right? The iTunes store and App store? All those 99c songs and apps weren't paid for by cash...

I expect they'll set up some kind of 'one click' system - like Amazon, Apple etc...

Cheers, Pete.

Most people including me, then. How many people buy only one 99c song in one transaction?
On the odd occasion when a want a single track from Amazon, i add it to a larger order.

[GeoffC]

It's a brave move by The Times, I'll willing pay for the paper copy, but not for a digital version -
reason : I don't like reading longish articles on a PC screen; and I can't really justify the purchase of a larger screened reader just for a newspaper -

now if they'd taken the idea to the next step and provided an iPad (for instance) included in the subscription - then I might be tempted, even if that price was slightly higher ... it would, at least, get rid of the annoying articles that are important to be started on page 1 and then continue on page 5! - although the digital versions will probably have their own quirks....

[cgk]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yes, now think about the names. They are not general papers, they're dealing with a specialist audience, which has cash to burn.


Harmon - For general news, I'm not willing to use any single source, which means any single paper is only of fractional worth to me (and many others) compared to a specialist rag. I'd be willing to pay for a good agent which handled getting my news according to my set specifications, but not the news itself per-se.

It's not even that, often the company is paying for the subscription or its a tax deduction.

[DawnFalcon]

Also true ^^

[petermillard]

Originally Posted by Conor

How many people buy only one 99c song in one transaction? On the odd occasion when a want a single track from Amazon, i add it to a larger order.

I really don't think it matters. If there's an easy way to pay (e.g. one-click) then what difference does it make how much (or little) it is? Sorry, I just think it's a non-issue.

And seriously, how many people will buy a single issue for £1 when you can get a weeks subscription for £2?

Cheers, Pete

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by basschick

one problem with a "paywall" is that it will substantially lower the number of readers, and that's not going to please the advertisers. after all, who wants to pay the same to advertise on a website that has 1/10th or less of its original readers?

Paywalls typically lock off around 50-60% of content. Still plenty to pull in readers.

Also, think of it this way. You can make 2¢ per unique visitor per day, from online ads alone; or you can make 6¢ from ad revenue plus subscription fee. E.g. the WSJ would need to quadruple its readership to make up for the loss of subscription fees -- a difficult proposition at best. Further, it's possible (though not guaranteed) that the remaining readers have a more attractive demographic profile.

I.e. it's worth taking the hit to your audience if you can make a significantly higher amount of revenue per reader.

Next, online ads pay so poorly that losing 50% of online readers does not mean losing 50% of total revenues. To wit:

Originally Posted by Washington Post

At current online ad rates, "You need 4 billion page views per month in order to make $50 million in revenue per year," Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, said in an interview Wednesday.

(more info here, relating to NY Times putting up a paywall soon)

Granted we are all accustomed to free news online; I'm not going to be terribly happy when the NYT goes paywall. But ultimately, if you want better quality content, someone has to pay for it. In the US it won't be the government, and online ads just aren't a sufficient source of revenues.

[Crowl]

Originally Posted by GeoffC

now if they'd taken the idea to the next step and provided an iPad (for instance) included in the subscription - then I might be tempted, even if that price was slightly higher ... it would, at least, get rid of the annoying articles that are important to be started on page 1 and then continue on page 5! - although the digital versions will probably have their own quirks....

These are clearly just their first steps into the pay market with their newspapers, given that the ipad still doesn't have a confirmed release date in europe while they may offer read anywhere deals later, it does seem sensible for them to get this first stage out of the way first or maybe they will update their options before the launch. There are plenty of options they could add in the future e.g. maybe they have a number of people that only ever read the one columnist, rather than losing those readers they could sell a reduced subscription that only covered that bit of the paper or you could have bigger subs that covered all the murdoch papers.

As far as the overall idea, it does seem like it will be tougher for them than some like the wsj that has a more specialised content and audience because a large amount of people will just go elsewhere, but as long as they are no worse off financially I don't think they will worry at first and if the change improves things for them then the other equally struggling newspapers will probably follow suit, which would in turn make things better for them.

As far as reputation, that has nothing to do with total audience, the most popular papers in the uk are the tabloids and they are all a load of crap.