virtualeconomics

How little newspapers matter

News today is that the world's second most popular English-language newspaper, the News of the World, is to close. Most likely it will simply be replaced by a Sunday edition of the Sun (the world's most popular English-language newspaper).

Not because, like so many newspapers in the early C21st, it loses money. The News of the World makes money hand over fist (not literally of course), so much so that its closure threatens its persistently loss-making quality stablemate the Times. Printing lies about celebrities is worth a fortune and the model is replicated thousands of times around the world. 

News International seeks to establish a print/online equivalence that simply isn't there

So the latest numbers are in for the Times paywall. Now eight months old it deserves, perhaps, to no longer be dubbed an experiment. Charging for people to look at the Times online is now business as usual in the Wapping fortress, and business as usual is doing...ok. Over at Paidcontent there's a copy of the full release and Robert Andrews takes a more detailed look at what the numbers mean.

At the end of the first four months behind a paywall they'd racked up 50,000 actual subscribers (people paying £2 a week) plus 105,000 other "digital purchase events" - people buying a one-day pass. Four more months on, at the end of Feb, they have a total of 79,000 monthly subscribers and a total 222,000 "sales of digital products" - people buying a one-day pass, plus sales of the Sunday Times iPad app. So, as Paidcontent notes, subscription sales have slowed down but sales overall have increased.

Everything useful I know about The Daily

Everything that's not about the Egyptian revolution today has been about the launch of the Daily. Here's everything I know about it, which I suspect is a fair summary of what anyone outside News Corp itself knows about it.

News organisations need to experiment with new digital ideas. This is one, and it seems to have proper funding an impressive talent pool. Good.

News Corp hasn't achieved any sustainable successes in digital, but then again a lot of the plays they've made have been into fickle, hit-and-miss spaces where they've lost out to world-class competition. News Corp is pretty good at (a certain type of) news though and could make something work here.

No-one knows yet what the take-up will be. If News Corp's statements about the take-up of the paid Times website are anything to go by we'll have to work out actual take-up for ourselves a few months down the line, but until there's some numbers to look at I'm just going to go ahead and admit that I don't know how many people will buy it. And neither does anyone else. 

Strange redefinition of public interest

As Jon Slattery reports, the Sun today leads (leads!) with a blistering condemnation of an Appeals Court ruling that prevents the paper naming a prominent sportsman they would like to accuse of sexual infidelity. 

The article is astonishing in its fury and tone, denouncing Britain as "a judicial banana republic" and claiming that "it is vital for democracy we know the names of those who go to court to have newspapers silenced". 

Unmitigated twaddle. This is not a corrupt politician or CEO who has pushed through an unpopular public agenda by masquerading as a family values campaigner. It's some guy who kicks a ball, or possibly hits one with a stick, for the lightest of light entertainment. The matter is of potentially legitimate interest to his allegedly various partners, and perhaps whichever companies happen to sponsor him. The Sun's fury is the fury of an infant denied its favourite noisy toy at bedtime, and dressing the matter up as a crusade for democracy and freedom of the press shouldn't fool even that paper's readership.

(Photo nicked from Jon's blog)

Latest on Posettigate

Thinking about Posettigate again, the interesting thing now that the case has been effectively dropped is what it's possible to believe about Chris Mitchell's motives in bringing it in the first place.

(1) He genuinely believed that a newspaper editor suing a journalist for defamation was a sensible and positive way to protect his professional reputation, and that the consequences for his reputation would be positive.

(2) He knew what everyone else immediately spotted - that the consequences for his professional reputation would be disastrous (though perhaps not as globally disastrous as it has proved) - but for some other reason he went ahead and did it anyway.

No-one else believed (1), and everyone says the guy is neither mad nor stupid. What might reason (2) be?

Why a paywall might make sense for the Telegraph this time

Earlier today the FT broke the news that the Telegraph is (probably) joining the Times, FT and indeed News of the World by putting up a paywall next year. A spokesman told Reuters by email that "absolutely no decisions have been made on the introduction of a paid-content model," but a number of Telegraph execs appear to have confirmed to the FT that there would be a paywall in place before the end of 2011. 

Paywall experiments over the past ten years have been a disaster for online newspapers. However, the Telegraph's move could perhaps be justified by two fundamental changes to this market - an increased scarcity of professional journalism online, and the effective collapse of the Telegraph's current commercial model, occasioned primarily by Facebook. 

News Corp's bundling strategy for the Times online kicks off

Earlier this month I was looking at the Times online subscription numbers and concluding that they implied a strategy to bundle the Times subscription with News Corp's more valuable telephony/ISP/TV business.

(This looks even more likely, incidentally, now the service is being advertised on the London Underground and on daytime TV - the economics of above the line advertising make sense for Sky but little for the new Times website).

Today Paidcontent reports that the subscription site is now to be given away as part of mobile provider 3's, thus commencing the strategy of bundling content that has been made artificially scarce through the erection of this paywall with an access and telephony service. To be fair, News Corp is still operating within the letter of what chairman James Murdoch claimed, that there were "no immediate plans to bundle the Times Online with Sky television services". And yet, if they are to bundle access to Times content for a cut of someone else's access and telephony revenues, why wouldn't they bundle it with their own? Right now, it seems very likely they are delaying that obvious next move so as to avoid handing the regulators looking into the BskyB takeover another stick with which to beat them. But clearly it is now only a matter of time.

News Corp now running ads for Times online during daytime TV

A few days ago I knocked some numbers together to understand the new Times paywall, concluding - per Barry Collins's original observation on an old PC Pro podcast -  that the strategy made most sense as part of News Corp's general content bundling approach and the intended buyout of BskyB (a conclusion which incidentally David Prosser seems to have reached independently at about the same time).

What made less sense to me was seeing a TV ad for the new Times online subscription service today, either during the break or at the end of daytime quiz show Wogan's Perfect Recall (so around 3pm this afternoon. Needless to say I wasn't really paying attention until I noticed the ad and alas didn't manage to get a photo for proof but I definitely saw the ad and it was definitely for the online product).

Quite how the ostensible ambition of extending online the long-term relationship with a valuable, Times-loyalist news audience is served by running TV ads to students and the unemployed is puzzling, and seems unlikely also to make any real commercial sense given the cost of (even daytime) TV ads, conversion rates from TV to online and the value to News Corp of Times online subscribers.

Perhaps it's a branding exercise (though that raises the question what segement of the potential Times audience doesn't already know the brand?). Perhaps I saw the only one or this is a matter of remnant inventory exchanged between C4 and News Corp on terms unfathomable to the casual observer. But it occurs to me that this is another move that makes most sense if the Times online is considered as part of an overall (£500 pa ARPU) News Corp content/ISP/TV/telephony bundle, which is the sort of thing that advertising on TV would make a bit of sense in a way that advertising an online newspaper really doesn't.