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The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment
- Quarrelsome 16y agoCouple of things to ponder considering future audiences. a) How many of those 105,000 subs do we think are under 40 yrs old? b) Try to sign up to the site and you will note something interesting when entering in your DOB. This text: "You must be 18 or over to use our websites" I assume this is because most payment processes don't cater for < 18s. But still, think about it, it is now an over 18s ONLY newsite. Therefore I think the future of The Times looks actually quite bleak due to the lack of future readership.
- axod 16y agoI don't think "The Times" has ever been a 'young' newspaper. I'd expect its reader demographics to be heavily skewed toward 30+ year olds. So I don't think this is much of a change from that.
- ig1 16y agoNo newspaper has strong under-18 readership, even under-21 readership is fairly small for most papers. Most newspaper readers don't start until they're in their mid-20s.
- axod 16y agoFWIW, Newspapers such as "The sun" I'd expect to have a far younger readership than "The Times". eg Tabloids are read by the young, grown up broadsheets by the old.
- mdemare 16y agoFrom Yes Prime Minister: "I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
- Quarrelsome 16y agoI don't buy it. I think that's hearsay. You pick a paper and more or less stick with it. I've seen plenty of people sub 30 read The Times. It's the paper you used to read if you wanted to be "serious" (pre-Murdoch). Your paper of choice is typically picked when you first start working around the ages of 18-24 or even before then. I find it bizarre to imagine someone hitting 30+ and then changing their paper of choice. I don't think people work like that.
- carbocation 16y ago>"Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before."
- scrrr 16y agoYep, and advertisers can now target readers that are willing to spend money online.
- axod 16y agoWait so after you subscribe, paying hard cash for access, they still show you advertisements? Who are these suckers paying for access?
- awa 16y agoOh so you don't get ads on your TV or in the magazines you subscribe to?
- flipbrad 16y agoWell, I don't. Whether it's the BBC, ITV, iPlayer, 4OD for video, or Le Canard Enchaine for press, or the stuff in my RSS feed, I'm only paying one way or the other.
- ahi 16y agoTV is free? Most magazine subscriptions can be had for ~$10/year.
- awa 16y agoThe parent objected to paying cash + being subjected to looking at ads. I tried to point out that's how traditional media has worked with examples from TV and magazines.
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- ibejoeb 16y agoFrom the other perspective, as the new york times puts it: "More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site" https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/business/media/03newscorp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/business/media/03newscorp...
- olegkikin 16y ago$16 per month * 100,000 * 12 months = $19.2 M per year Would 4 million readers bring that much in ad revenue? Depends on how good their ad sales team is. Here's Alexa graph: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&c=1&y=r&b=ffffff&n=666666&r=2y&u=timesonline.co.uk http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...
- malandrew 16y agoNo. I calculated the revenue per user per month for the NY Times a while ago and based on 2008 figures, it was about 71 cents per user per month. I was using numbers from several different sources when I made that calculation so I can't guarantee its accuracy.
- sin7 16y ago0.71 $/user/month * 4,000,000 user * 12 month/year = 34,080,000 $/year > $19.2 M What am I doing wrong?
- jrockway 16y agoIs scaling up your architecture 40x free? (Actually, for static content, it might be. But remember, each user using your site has some incremental cost. If the incremental cost exceeds what they generate in ad revenue, you lose.)
- seabee 16y agoI dare say the cost of producing the content far exceeds the cost of serving it up to people.
- andrewgioia 16y agoThe article title is pretty misleading here. It starts off citing a 62% drop in uniques and 90% drop in pageviews and how disastrous it's been, but concludes that they're actually netting $600,000 more per month from the subscription revenue than they would if they kept it free with ads. Assuming those CPM figures are accurate, that sounds like a pretty good business decision, especially with a more focused user base that actually places value in the paper's content.
- junkbit 16y agoHere's a link from The Times front page with their own take on the numbers http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/media/article2791089.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/media/arti...
- ig1 16y agoLooks like Rupert Murdoch gambled correctly. Congratulations to him for taking a high-risk move in the face of huge opposition. I think it has a valuable lesson for entrepreneurs that sometimes taking the unpopular route can be the correct business decision.
- rwmj 16y agoMy blog, daily readership of just under 1000, can now boast an audience that is 1% of the size of a national UK newspaper. Except my blog costs next to nothing to run, maybe an hour a day and use of a laptop. The cost basis alone of the Times website is clearly and massively wrong. At the very least if this business decision is good (losing 99% of your audience and hiding yourself from Google is at best dubious), but if it still makes sense, someone else can come along and undercut them on cost and make even more money.
- ig1 16y agoPut some ads on your blog. You'll make maybe $300-400/year. You'll essentially be making $1/hour. Advertising doesn't generate anywhere enough revenue to cover a journalists salary let alone the overheads of a news gathering organization.
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- MichaelGG 16y agoReally? According to[1], print advertising brought in over $47 billion in 2005. Skip to 2009 and that number a bit over half (24.8BN), with online newspaper advertising not even getting in 3BN. That seems like a major loss in revenue to newspapers, one that must be making an impact. According to the NYT's 10-K [2], 53% of revenue comes from advertising! Yet in 2005, 66% did [3]. Also remember as print subscribers fall off, those costs fall off too. The raw cost of materials was around 30% of subscriber revenue, although I think they trimmed the size of it down to help out there. Wages for the actual print side are another fair portion. So, contrary to other claims, it would seem that advertising generates quite enough revenue to cover journalists. EDIT: Perhaps _online_ advertising isn't enough to cover salaries, but that's a separate issue. The newspapers are trying to make a transition as that nice money from advertising (especially classifieds) dries up. They can whine and complain about people "getting stuff for free" but it doesn't change the fact they are painfully adjusting to a new business model. 1: http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures.aspx http://www.naa.org/TrendsandNumbers/Advertising-Expenditures... 2: http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials/drawFiling.asp?docKey=136-000119312510036478-40RGSMR85LU9ELC7LLSMAE5QCT&docFormat=HTM&formType=10-K http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/financials... 3: http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2005/2005NYTannual.pdf http://www.nytco.com/pdf/annual_2005/2005NYTannual.pdf
- omh 16y agoAs the comments at TC discuss, this doesn't take account of how many ads are running per page, and depending on how the various numbers stack up it could go either way. But if they were making more money from this, wouldn't today's press releases have boasted about this, rather than just the increased numbers?
- estel 16y agoLarge media companies such as News Corp seem exceptionally wary about advertising their revenue and profit margins; so it would have massively surprised me had they done this.
- ry0ohki 16y agoI wants mines for free.
- mchafkin 16y agoI don't understand how this is being spun as a failure. It sounds like a success based on the bottom line: "Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers." Sounds pretty good to me.
- mattmaroon 16y agoFor the most part it isn't. I saw this reported in the mainstream media a couple times today and it was spun as a resounding success. Tech blogs are run by ideologues in favor of everything being free.
- og1 16y agoAlso, which I think was not mentioned is they get to pay less operational expenses because the bandwidth used is lower.
- MichaelGG 16y agoTechdirt has a nice writeup of how the numbers are not as good as they make them out to be. For instance, the full price is 2 pounds/week, but there is a trial right now for 1 pound a month. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101102/02570411678/murdoch-s-paywall-numbers-sound-better-than-they-really-are.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101102/02570411678/murdoc...
- iuguy 16y agoA lot of people have been talking about this as a failure, but I'm not so sure it's either a straight failure or success. The Times lost a lot of traction, but in doing so gained a lot of revenue both direct and indirect. Add to that the reduction in potential overhead (server 100,000 users instead of millions) and the ability to add content from the main newspaper without fear of it being 'stolen' (compared to if it was open - yes I know it'll be shared in some form anyway, it's news after all, but that's not necessarily how the powers that be may perceive it, and they may feel it's better to push content from the dead tree version out. I don't know, I don't subscribe to either) and you have something that is significantly more profitable than before. If that's the goal, then they win. If bums on seats is the goal, then they lose.
- gaius 16y agoThe Times experience on the iPad is pretty good. That's the future - custom clients whose owners are comfortable making small payments on a whim. (Full disclosure, I am a Times subscriber)
- gamble 16y agoGood for them. I heartily encourage News Corp to put all of their newspapers behind pay walls. In fact, if my meager contribution were enough to convince them, I would be the first in line to pay so that all of their television news could remain safely behind a pay wall as well. Godspeed, Mr. Murdoch.