Times of London website visits fall by two-thirds
Well I can confirm that their decision to erect a paywall directly led to me no longer visiting their site.
It will be interesting to see whether the paywall works for them, but these things were tried and failed in the past so I expect the result to be the same.
My feeling on this is that there are better ways to monetize journalism. One way to do this would be to have a two tier system were readers can read the news as usual, but if you want to get access to the source materials and editorial decisions used to assemble the stories, or to be able to see the journalists at work (for example validating source material), you might pay a subscription. That way people who wanted a deeper understanding could pay to get that.
Presumably this means that the remaining online readership is now composed only of paying customers? Not exactly disastrous.
Can't read the article without registering but just wanted go say the recent deal between Yahoo! And Guardian/Telegraph/Mail looked like a win for all involved. I bet The Times would have liked in on that.
(Yahoo! UK added tabs for those newspapers' headlines onto their front page alongside their usual Yahoo News/ Reuters coverage. Clicking takes you to the papers own sites)
As a UK resident I think the Times missed a trick in their pricing model. Rampant speculation follows: I expect a decent chunk of their visitors are people who receive links via some other Internet medium (social networks, blogs etc.) and who click through to read it. These people are now instantly turned off. If The Times had a decent micropayments model in place (say £1 for 10 articles) this might be a lot more attractive. Unfortunately I don't think Murdoch cares about casual readers.
I think the sad thing about this story, is the likely deal that Rupert Murdoch will have made with the current UK conservative-led government.
The UK Tories don't like big-government, and they believe that free-enterprise should be encouraged at the expense of public services.
The BBC is, quite rightly, a public service - and is unique in its ability to remain relatively impartial and free from commercial pressures. It's successful and provides news coverage that rivals much of the other paid-for news available in the UK.
Last year, Mr Murdoch was making large noises about how the BBC's success makes it more difficult for him to profit from his UK news and media wings. In the run up to the election, his suite of media publications supported the Conservative campaign strongly. Now we have a conservative win - we have an announcement that the BBC is going to be cut back severely, possibly with a reduction to it's main source of income (the license fee).
Maybe I'm being a bit cynical - but I'm pretty certain this isn't a coincidence. While the BBC is providing a good source of news, and programming - paywall experiments like this are far more likely to fail.
However, if the BBC is crippled (as it potentially will be), I think the option of paying for news will seem more and more attractive.
How ironic is it that an article about the abject failure of a paywall is hidden behind a registrationwall, which has proven to be almost as much of a barrier?
I'm surprised it's not more.
Actually, if they are all paying - that's a really good result.
> The data include users who may simply arrive on the homepage and then leave without paying, but Mr Goad said average visit time had stayed relatively consistent, suggesting most visitors had paid to view a story.
It might be that the people who are paying to read are people who spend longer reading the site.
Article about a paywall behind a paywall? Stack overflow...
Rupert Murdoch and Cablevision have now proven this model doesn't really work and is contrary to the rules of the Web. Anyone else wanna try?
(Disclosure: I actually subscribed to Newsday's paywall mode for a little while, basically to make fun of it: http://shortformblog.com/tag/customer-36 )