The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/02/times-paywall-4-million-readers/

by ssclafani • 16 years ago

59 58 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

carbocation• 16 years ago

>"Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before."

scrrr• 16 years ago

Yep, and advertisers can now target readers that are willing to spend money online.

ceejayoz• 16 years ago

Not to mention users who are identifiable down to address and name level, instead of mostly on an IP-only basis.

axod4• 16 years ago

Wait so after you subscribe, paying hard cash for access, they still show you advertisements?

Who are these suckers paying for access?

irrelative• 16 years ago

Exactly. As a businesses, they aren't trying to optimize viewers but profits.

megablast• 16 years ago

No, this is completely wrong. This is suggesting that having fewer people reading your newspaper is not a bad thing, when it is exactly the opposite. You want more people to read your newspaper, and there is a indirect cost to losing those readers.

One of the main things you are losing is influence, all those readers have gone to another paper to get their news.

Nevertheless an interesting experiment, we will see how long the times keeps this up.

guelo• 16 years ago

The problem is over time as noone links to their stories they slowly lose relevancy and their brand diminishes. Remember, the future of news is online, and right now they are probably at their peak number of subscribers. They have nowhere to go but down.

timthorn2• 16 years ago

The Times is the establisment newspaper in the UK - it's like the BBC of print. The UK newspaper market is not like the US and is still pretty healthy; The Times isn't going anywhere in the near future.

rlpb• 16 years ago

I'm not so sure. Quality across the media has suffered over the years because they have been driven by advertising, which is driven by eyeballs. This creates an incentive for attention grabbing headlines and sensationalist articles and works against good journalism.

If they are able to generate more revenue, perhaps they will be able to restore the quality that the industry has lost and use real journalists again. They could build a reputation of quality over sensationalism.

ibejoeb• 16 years ago

From the other perspective, as the new york times puts it:

"More Than 100,000 Pay for British News Site"

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/business/media/03newscorp...

olegkikin2• 16 years ago

$16 per month * 100,000 * 12 months = $19.2 M per year

Would 4 million readers bring that much in ad revenue?

Depends on how good their ad sales team is.

Here's Alexa graph: http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=400&h=220&o=f&...

malandrew2• 16 years ago

No. I calculated the revenue per user per month for the NY Times a while ago and based on 2008 figures, it was about 71 cents per user per month.

I was using numbers from several different sources when I made that calculation so I can't guarantee its accuracy.

ig14• 16 years ago

Seems unlikely, given that Techcrunch which is heavily monetized made about $10 million from 9 million unique visitors.

andrewgioia• 16 years ago

The article title is pretty misleading here. It starts off citing a 62% drop in uniques and 90% drop in pageviews and how disastrous it's been, but concludes that they're actually netting $600,000 more per month from the subscription revenue than they would if they kept it free with ads. Assuming those CPM figures are accurate, that sounds like a pretty good business decision, especially with a more focused user base that actually places value in the paper's content.

junkbit2• 16 years ago

Here's a link from The Times front page with their own take on the numbers

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/business/industries/media/arti...

rwmj3• 16 years ago

Sorry, couldn't read that, it's behind some sort of paywall :-)

junkbit2• 16 years ago

EDIT: Sorry if I sounded whiny, but you had to click on the link so a smiley face would have spoiled the joke

ig14• 16 years ago

Looks like Rupert Murdoch gambled correctly. Congratulations to him for taking a high-risk move in the face of huge opposition.

I think it has a valuable lesson for entrepreneurs that sometimes taking the unpopular route can be the correct business decision.

rwmj3• 16 years ago

My blog, daily readership of just under 1000, can now boast an audience that is 1% of the size of a national UK newspaper. Except my blog costs next to nothing to run, maybe an hour a day and use of a laptop.

The cost basis alone of the Times website is clearly and massively wrong. At the very least if this business decision is good (losing 99% of your audience and hiding yourself from Google is at best dubious), but if it still makes sense, someone else can come along and undercut them on cost and make even more money.

ig14• 16 years ago

Put some ads on your blog. You'll make maybe $300-400/year.

You'll essentially be making $1/hour. Advertising doesn't generate anywhere enough revenue to cover a journalists salary let alone the overheads of a news gathering organization.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

This is akin to saying someone can come along and make a $20 smart phone and Apple will lose all of their iPhone revenues.

People will pay more for quality. No offense to you, but your blog would likely not be considered that by 100k people, at least not enough to pay. (Neither would mine). Quality content costs real money to produce, some schlub like you or me writing our opinions online does not.

Charging certainly wouldn't work for bloggers, but it just might for outlets like this or the WSJ or the NYT. There's a market for both.

user242• 16 years ago

modesty's great and all, but if you're not going to link to your blog in the comment at least make sure you've a link to it in your HN profile!

omh• 16 years ago

As the comments at TC discuss, this doesn't take account of how many ads are running per page, and depending on how the various numbers stack up it could go either way. But if they were making more money from this, wouldn't today's press releases have boasted about this, rather than just the increased numbers?

estel• 16 years ago

Large media companies such as News Corp seem exceptionally wary about advertising their revenue and profit margins; so it would have massively surprised me had they done this.

Quarrelsome2• 16 years ago

Couple of things to ponder considering future audiences.

a) How many of those 105,000 subs do we think are under 40 yrs old?

b) Try to sign up to the site and you will note something interesting when entering in your DOB. This text:

"You must be 18 or over to use our websites"

I assume this is because most payment processes don't cater for < 18s. But still, think about it, it is now an over 18s ONLY newsite.

Therefore I think the future of The Times looks actually quite bleak due to the lack of future readership.

axod4• 16 years ago

I don't think "The Times" has ever been a 'young' newspaper. I'd expect its reader demographics to be heavily skewed toward 30+ year olds. So I don't think this is much of a change from that.

ig14• 16 years ago

No newspaper has strong under-18 readership, even under-21 readership is fairly small for most papers. Most newspaper readers don't start until they're in their mid-20s.

mdemare• 16 years ago

From Yes Prime Minister:

"I know exactly who reads the papers: the Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country; The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country; and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M

Quarrelsome2• 16 years ago

I don't buy it. I think that's hearsay.

You pick a paper and more or less stick with it. I've seen plenty of people sub 30 read The Times. It's the paper you used to read if you wanted to be "serious" (pre-Murdoch).

Your paper of choice is typically picked when you first start working around the ages of 18-24 or even before then.

I find it bizarre to imagine someone hitting 30+ and then changing their paper of choice. I don't think people work like that.

ry0ohki• 16 years ago

I wants mines for free.

mchafkin• 16 years ago

I don't understand how this is being spun as a failure. It sounds like a success based on the bottom line:

"Depending on the actual CPM, financially they are doing at least two to four times better than they were before. And that is with only about 1.5 percent of their former readers becoming paying subscribers."

Sounds pretty good to me.

mattmaroon2• 16 years ago

For the most part it isn't. I saw this reported in the mainstream media a couple times today and it was spun as a resounding success.

Tech blogs are run by ideologues in favor of everything being free.

og1• 16 years ago

Also, which I think was not mentioned is they get to pay less operational expenses because the bandwidth used is lower.

MichaelGG2• 16 years ago

Techdirt has a nice writeup of how the numbers are not as good as they make them out to be. For instance, the full price is 2 pounds/week, but there is a trial right now for 1 pound a month.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101102/02570411678/murdoc...

_b8r0• 16 years ago

A lot of people have been talking about this as a failure, but I'm not so sure it's either a straight failure or success.

The Times lost a lot of traction, but in doing so gained a lot of revenue both direct and indirect. Add to that the reduction in potential overhead (server 100,000 users instead of millions) and the ability to add content from the main newspaper without fear of it being 'stolen' (compared to if it was open - yes I know it'll be shared in some form anyway, it's news after all, but that's not necessarily how the powers that be may perceive it, and they may feel it's better to push content from the dead tree version out. I don't know, I don't subscribe to either) and you have something that is significantly more profitable than before. If that's the goal, then they win. If bums on seats is the goal, then they lose.

gaius• 16 years ago

The Times experience on the iPad is pretty good. That's the future - custom clients whose owners are comfortable making small payments on a whim.

(Full disclosure, I am a Times subscriber)

gamble• 16 years ago

Good for them. I heartily encourage News Corp to put all of their newspapers behind pay walls. In fact, if my meager contribution were enough to convince them, I would be the first in line to pay so that all of their television news could remain safely behind a pay wall as well. Godspeed, Mr. Murdoch.

The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment

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