Media · 7 July 2010 ·
The Times and the Paywall
A quick note on Murdoch’s experiment of erecting a paywall for the Sunday Times. There is currently an introductory rebate on the online subscription for the Times to get the whole thing started. Thus, you can currently get access to the Times and Sunday Times website for £1 for 30 days, instead of paying £1 per day and £2 for one week’s access.
A drop in readership
Yet the statistics show a considerable drop in visitors. According to Alexa webstats, timesonline.co.uk experienced a considerable drop of -16% of their total page views during the last 7 days, -50.3% over the last month and -18.8% over the last three months. (These Alexa statistics prove to be rather confusing here, but from the graph a big drop at around the introduction of the paywall seems evident.) The Inquirer already proclaims that the Times’ “readership plummets”. But although this is evident from the numbers mentioned, I do not share the view that already means it’s a failed experiment (yet). Whether or not Murdoch played the right card and will make money, depends on how many people will actually sign up, and whether the revenue from the paying readership will be higher than from placing advertisements on the website. It does not matter whether the actual readership declined drastically. It’s about balancing the numbers. If I have 1 million readers who each only earn me 5p per user through advertisements, I have made £50,000. But if I have only a tenth of the readership, but these 100,000 people each pay £1.50 on average, then I have made £150,000, alas thrice as much money. Mind you, these numbers are entirely made up and I believe the actual advertisement-based revenue is much higher than 5p. Yet, no one apart from the Times and Murdoch’s Newscorp have the statistics on this, and even if, it’s too early to tell whether the Times will be duly missed by its online readership. If so, I doubt it was because of its high quality science section.
In the meantime, the Guardian gives all the former Times readers a warm welcome and even begins to publish the data behind their facts and statistics.
Times taking a loose stance on copyright
However, there’s an interesting spin to the Time’s paywall for their “award-winning journalism” (Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International) Yet, the “real value” that she’s talking about seems to come from elsewhere and I’m inclined to say that the paywall the Times erected is permeable, but from the wrong way: The Times have ripped an article about a wee holiday trip of former home secretary Kenneth Clarke and Panorama’s Tom Mangold from a website called Gentlemen Ranters. Ironically, this is the very same behaviour that Murdoch continuously speaks out against: About those horrible blogs and evil Google stealing their precious content from their websites and not paying for it. No, the Times did not pay the Gentlemen Ranters, they did not even ask for permission. And although they credit the author, they don’t not mention the original source, thus depriving the Gentlemen Ranters of traffic. Ironically, even Google and most bloggers would have linked and accredited the source properly. But it seems that the media industry has double standards here: It’s not ok if you want to access content for free, but they may use whatever they want, put it behind a paywall and don’t pay a penny for it.
References
For an in-depth discussion of paywalls, I can recommend Shirky’s outlook on the future of newspapers and Cecil Adams case study of online boards.
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