virtualeconomics

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.

Daily Mash tells the news how it is

From today's Daily Mash article, "BRITISH MEDIA URGED TO DO DECENT THING WITH REVOLVER":

"The Daily Telegraph is showered with awards because it offered to buy a CD-ROM with MPs expenses on it.

"The Guardian is currently even more pleased with itself than usual because it's publishing classified information that not a single one of its journalists helped to gather.

"The News of the World proclaims itself as the greatest newspaper in the world because of its rare journalistic ability to record mobile phone conversations."

Update: newspaper of record poll

Last week loyal readers will recall I posted up a poll to see whether the Times was still considered the UK's newspaper of record, now its website sits inaccessibly behind a paywall.

Since then Roy Greenslade very kindly picked up my question and linked back to the poll, which brought a lot more votes in over the past few days. Also the Telegraph is now thought to be implementing its own paywall next year which complicates the picture.

The results are currently about 3/1 in favour of the Times not being our newspaper of record, but they're still based on a relatively small sample (150 people) and there's a significant pro-Guardian weighting to the sample, almost certainly because so many participants came from the link there. So if you haven't already do click on the link to vote, and if you can get the poll in front of Telegraph, Times, Indy or Mail readers too that would certainly make the sample more robust. Thanks. 

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.