Times and Sunday Times readership falls after paywall

[HuskyPup]

Not too sure if Foo is the right place for this nonetheless very interesting:

More than 100,000 people have paid to go behind the Times and Sunday Times' new online paywalls but visits to their websites have fallen by about 87%.

[bbc.co.uk...]

[kaled]

10% of something is a whole lot better than 100% of nothing. (And I don't suppose the fall in advertising detracts hugely from those figures.)

I thought their prices were rather high but maybe they were right. If those sort of figures can be sustained, I would expect other publishers to follow suit - that will leave just the BBC. Looking ahead, they might follow suit too for users based outside the UK.

Kaled.

[engine]

100,000 people is not an unreasonable number, especially if they are dedicated readers and come back day after day. The other thing to remember is that they will have stats on the readers' profiles so they can offer better targeted advertising, and probably charge a higher rate.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
John Wanamaker, (attributed)
US department store merchant (1838 - 1922)

If that figure can be brought down by any significant level, it'll be worth the paper asking for a higher ad rate.

[graeme_p]

The problem is that the 100,000 includes everyone who paid any subscription, which may be a one-off £1 for one day access (or the current £1 for a month special offer) or a recurring £2 a week.

So we know that they have made probably more than £100,000 from the site since the paywall went up, but less than £200,000 a week.

On the other hand they have gone from 21m uniques a month to 2.7m. A lot of that 2.7m will have seen the payment page and gone away. With 100,000 people actually reading the site they are not going to get a huge amount in ad revenues even at good rates. The ad revenue that they made from the other 18m must have been substatial.

[Status_203]

One thing that might be easier behind a paywall though is bugging your content so that if it gets copied you know which subscriber copied it. (and it's harder to keep changing payment methods than IP addresses)

[karter2]

I'd guess itimate that @ 27 mill uniques, that might be worth 300 to 500k per month at standard outsourced cpc rates

thats a turnover of under 6 mill a year, for a paper like the Times, thats not enough to build a future on

A similar paper , the guardian had turnover of 400 mill circa 1999
[gmgplc.co.uk...]

These guys need to replace a lot off income lost to the web to be able to keep functioning

[kaled]

At the moment, people can still access free news content, however, if other publishers follow suit (ignoring the BBC) users may have to pay - that would change the figures enormously.

So far, no one has found a way to deal in news profitably on the internet. This is just a first step of a serious attempt to try to do so. Ultimately, this approach is likely to become the norm or newspapers will pull out of the internet altogether (and force users to watch TV, buy newspapers or go without their daily fix of news).

Kaled.

[graeme_p]

@kaled, there are plenty of free news sources other than the BBC. Unless the newswires stop selling their services to free websites, this is not going to change.

Also, every site that switches to subscription will send more visitors to those that remain free, increasing their ad revenues.

[kaled]

You are correct in both points you make, however, the BBC will almost certainly remain free (in the UK) and directly employs a large number of journalists so the BBC News website is an exception. Even journalists admit that they often look to it first when they want to find out what's happening.

Newswires may continue to sell stories to free websites, however, if there is a disparity in the price they charge, they could decide that they are cutting their own throats by putting newspapers out of business.

Kaled.

[HuskyPup]

the BBC will almost certainly remain free (in the UK)

I hope so however they're obviously going to be under, within reason, huge pressure from the current government to be more efficient.

I wonder how many people globally would be quite happy to pay STG 1.00 per month for access to quality information? I quite happily pay for Britannica yet only use it sparingly, I'm at the Beeb several times every day but obviously pay for it through my TV licence unlike many others who get it for free.

Whenever I've travelled throughout the world I've automatically expected to get BBC World News on the radio and more recently their TV programmes however everything does have to be paid for eventually.

Nothing can be more sure than someone else coming along offering the "best" for free but for "how long"?

[vik_c]

Isn't the title a little 'obvious'? It's like saying 'Ice kept outside refrigerator melts' or 'Sun expected to set today evening again'.

[HuskyPup]

But isn't it strange that 100% of people before charging considered The Times a reliable and trustworthy source of free information but when charging comes into the game only 13% feel that the information is of ANY value?

Pay for it, you expect me to pay for it?

Does this 87% work for free I wonder and if not, why not?