No one is subscribing to The Times paywall – it is “an empty world”
The Times paywall - dawn or death of a revolution?
Sources quoted by US media columnist Michael Wolff say that no one is subscribing to The Times paywall. He says the newspaper’s website has been turned into an empty world.
In a post on the Newser website Wolff writes “My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself—who have free access to the site—are not going beyond the registration page. It’s an empty world.”
News International is not commenting on Wolff’s assertions, and two weeks in to the biggest leap of faith in modern day publishing, who can blame them. Suffice to say, the alternative view is that the company are so far understood to be encouraged by the numbers.
Wolff, who wrote the Rupert Murdoch book ‘The Man Who Owns the News’, also highlights the reaction to the Times paywall via a quote from a top PR person that he says was given to him by “a Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran”. The A-list entertainment publicist is reported to have asked why they would bother to get their client in The Times when it is behind a paywall? That’s a question.
The question the PR raises and the digital tumbleweed blowing through The Times highlights the problem that some of the bloggers and columnists talked about before the paywall went live.
The Times legal blogger BabyBarista quit the paper’s website in early June saying that the move to a paywall would be a disaster for News International. He has since joined the Guardian, which has been pushing a front-page promo panel advertising the fact that its website remains free.
Are others going to follow? Will there be any kind of exodus of bloggers from its website? I mean why not? People blog to get their blogs commented upon and shared – The Times has put an end to that with its anti-social media experiment.
You would expect just a couple of weeks into the paywall, with a people talking about it (talking it down?), this was the time when there would be some good news to report or at least good rumours, but apparently not.
PR Week today reported that a survey of 3,000 carried out for PRWeek by OnePoll found 93% thought newspapers should use advertising, rather than a paywall, to make money online.
This could prove a disaster for News International. Commercial leader Paul Hayes joked in May that he would be “in the shit”, if the paywall was not a success.
Obviously, there is a chance that Wolff is way off base and this source is wrong. Remember the story doing the rounds in January? Wolff tweeted that Murdoch was shopping The Times around in an effort to offload it.
The basis of that rumour was said to be that pay walls will not work and Murdoch and his key executives know it.
All Comments
Is that a suprise when there is BBC news, The Guardian, The Telegraph, Sky News and CNN?
Does the Times have anything more to offer than these sites?
no!
Part of the problem is the changes in domains too. It makes it hard for outsiders to check.
Alexa, for example, shows a 50% drop: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/timesonline.co.uk
Compete, with an American bias, shows a huge rise: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/thetimes.co.uk/
… but it’s a pointless measurement as we’re not comparing like for like.
This is hilarious. No really, the journos are in but no one is visiting. Have this image of a bunch of people peaking out over the wall and everyone going about their business paying no attention to TheTimes.co.uk at all. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer media baron.
Wasn’t FT.com the first online broadsheet to ask readers to pay to view content? That was several years ago. And I don’t think it worked.
I wonder if we’ve moved on since then. Sure, we’re swamped with low-quality news. Content farms make that worse. But we’ve had plenty of practice at desk research. And most people settle for lower quality at no cost.
Decent writing and proper investigative journalism costs money. Who’ll pay for that? And how?
I doubt consumers will pay for it direct in the same, old way we bought newspapers.
The Times is simply not a great on line experience. They employ too many knee jerk journalists who have not had an original idea in their whole lives. Why pay to read the same clap trap you can read on Guardian or the BBC any day for nothing. What is original or unique about The Times?
Alexa shows site visitors down 60%, but the average visitor now sees just 1.5 pages. That’s the front page and then the paywall and then they are away. When history is written the pay wall may well be the straw that broke the Dirty Digger’s back.
FT.com – erm look at the financials and see if it works…of course it does…but it’s a specialist niche read.
As @rich says FT.com and the WSJ.com are specialist and the only titles in their global markets. The both do it and it works — it is almost like protectionism. Also the FT gives you 30 articles a month free — the times rejected that approach. A mistake?
I agree @paul the Times has some good columnists David Aaronovitch, Simon Barnes and Daniel Finkelstein (some people like Caitlin Moran as well) but that is not enough to pay for a paper that lacks dynamism. If you do that as @david says people settle for free even if it is lower quality, which at the moment it isn’t as we have The Guardian and the BBC not to mention all those international titles like the New York Times (for now at least).
It needs a new editor, which is interesting as the rumour mill says it might get one in the shape of Roger Alton.
It all points to niche sites being the only people who can do this. For the rest they have to make the free web work.
I had a Twitter exchange with Ruth Gledhill earlier today. I told her I thought blogging within a paywall was like “shouting inside a soundproofed cell” and “crazy”. She retorted that “paying news journos to produces acres of free blog content was even crazier” But journalists are paid for journalism, not blogging, which is supplementary – and was it really worth it to have lost all her readers? “They are not unread and the are now making money to justify the time I spend on them!” she replied. So there. Someone is reading Ruth Gledhill’s walled-off blog. Just not anyone I’ve ever spoken to.
@Heresiarch great phrase “shouting inside a soundproofed cell” and I think you are spot on with it.
Personally as a journalist and blogger I don’t see the distinction — blogging is one facet. It is all journalism and it all serves the same purpose online: to drive traffic and revenue and to give people a reason to come back and read your copy no matter in what style it is written.
Besides look at Ruth Gledhill’s spalsh on the front of the site — it has been up for two hours and has…four comments.
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I miss Ruth’s blogg – always interesting and provocative – but I’m sure she had much more traffic than that pre-paywall. Perhaps all the rude and nasty bloggers (both religious and non-religious) have moved on and she’s left with the interesting and intelligent ones – I hope so. The point is that the debates have just moved on to other free blogs elsewhere such as here:
http://revdlesley.blogspot.com/
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