The Times paywalls go up...
Discussion
timesonline.co.uk now forwards to the new paywalled Times website. It's a bold (and some would say mis-informed) move by Murdoch to 'protect his news content'. So, how've things fared so far and what does it mean for the other 'papers' who continue to provide the news and commentary for free alongside advertising?
Newsline's article is revealing, to say the least:
Further insight into how things may progress:
To me, this smacks of 'old world media' struggling to get to grips with the new media market, much in the same way that the film and music industry have failed to adapt their business models to the online world.
Source: http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2010/06/17/the-time...
Newsline's article is revealing, to say the least:
Newsline said:
The Times' impending paywall has not only caused a stir in the industry, but has also made a difference to readers already, despite the new site still being in a free preview stage before a full pay model roll out later this month.
Since News International launched its new-look thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk sites, there have been notable changes in demographics, with more female visits and less male visits than before (compared to visits to Times Online, which is no longer in operation).
More 'older' people are also signing in to the new Times site, as more and more younger readers drop off. However, there has been no significant change in dwell time so far, and the peak time of day for visits to the Times and Sunday Times' sites remain between 9am and 12 noon.
Since the launch, Times readers have increased their visits to other news sites (up 27%), mainly turning to the Telegraph and Mail's web offering, although occasionally viewing The Sun as a substitute.
GfK's research director Gary Roddy, who presented the findings at today's MEP morning event, said it's still "early days" but he hopes to eventually monitor how the paywall will change reading habits and what it will mean for ad campaigns.
Despite predicting a substantial loss of readers, Roddy wonders if "paywall visitors will become more valuable to advertisers?"
Yesterday, Harris Interactive unveiled a new poll for paidContent:UK, which found that 76% of previous Times Online readers are "not at all likely" to pay for access to the new Times and Sunday Times websites.
The poll also showed that 13% of Times Online users rated themselves as "somewhat likely" to sign up, while 4% were "fairly likely" and 2% "very likely".
In terms of likelihood of paying, just 4% confirmed that they were "extremely likely" to pay for the online content. Out of the group "fairly likely" to pay, 6% were men and 2% were female.
Detailed GfK research on the Times' paywall to follow ...
So, in summary - only 4% of the users said they'd be extremely likely to pay. Just 4%. Three quarters definitely won't and are already drifting to other sites.Since News International launched its new-look thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk sites, there have been notable changes in demographics, with more female visits and less male visits than before (compared to visits to Times Online, which is no longer in operation).
More 'older' people are also signing in to the new Times site, as more and more younger readers drop off. However, there has been no significant change in dwell time so far, and the peak time of day for visits to the Times and Sunday Times' sites remain between 9am and 12 noon.
Since the launch, Times readers have increased their visits to other news sites (up 27%), mainly turning to the Telegraph and Mail's web offering, although occasionally viewing The Sun as a substitute.
GfK's research director Gary Roddy, who presented the findings at today's MEP morning event, said it's still "early days" but he hopes to eventually monitor how the paywall will change reading habits and what it will mean for ad campaigns.
Despite predicting a substantial loss of readers, Roddy wonders if "paywall visitors will become more valuable to advertisers?"
Yesterday, Harris Interactive unveiled a new poll for paidContent:UK, which found that 76% of previous Times Online readers are "not at all likely" to pay for access to the new Times and Sunday Times websites.
The poll also showed that 13% of Times Online users rated themselves as "somewhat likely" to sign up, while 4% were "fairly likely" and 2% "very likely".
In terms of likelihood of paying, just 4% confirmed that they were "extremely likely" to pay for the online content. Out of the group "fairly likely" to pay, 6% were men and 2% were female.
Detailed GfK research on the Times' paywall to follow ...
Further insight into how things may progress:
Newsline said:
The majority of people surveyed (33%), who agreed to pay, said they'd prefer to sign up for the £2-a-week payment model, while 16% would agree to a one-year subscription and 10% would pay £9.99 a month to download the title on to their iPad.
The poll is likely to be seen as positive for News International, which is expecting to lose around 90% of its online audience. Aside from the 4% of extremely likely payers, a significant number of people sit in the middle tier, which may be open to paying for online content.
"This is great news for Times Newspapers, giving it plenty of room to try to convert a larger minority of susceptible readers than previously thought - people who, right now, aren't subscribing for sure, but who may be open to the idea," the MediaGuardian reports.
If the pricing model is to be believed, News International will also be pleased that readers aren't opting for the lowest-value payment. If users sign up for the £2-a-week plan, they are likely to consider a longer-term option, as it automatically renews every seven days.
However, insiders still doubt Rupert Murdoch's paywall initiative. Of the readers who are "not at all likely" to pay for access, 70% said they will switch to another free news site, while 15% will continue to reading the Times and Sunday Times free headline page.
News International launched it's new-look Times and Sunday Times website at the end of May with a limited-time free preview in a bid to entice potential subscribers.
Timesonline.co.uk, which stopped operating today - users will now be re-directed to the new paid-for thetimes.co.uk site, was getting around 1.2 million visits a day in May (according to ABCe).
So timesonline was getting 1.2m visits a day, and 90% of those visitors are expected to leave. How on earth can the head honchos at News Corp think this is a good idea? There's also a yawning chasm between people saying they'd be 'likely' to pay (and if they were to do so, they'd pay the £2/week plan, not £1/day) and actually doing so. It can't be a way of generating money, and the site will be far less appealing to advertisers due to the decreased traffic. That's before we mention attrition rates..The poll is likely to be seen as positive for News International, which is expecting to lose around 90% of its online audience. Aside from the 4% of extremely likely payers, a significant number of people sit in the middle tier, which may be open to paying for online content.
"This is great news for Times Newspapers, giving it plenty of room to try to convert a larger minority of susceptible readers than previously thought - people who, right now, aren't subscribing for sure, but who may be open to the idea," the MediaGuardian reports.
If the pricing model is to be believed, News International will also be pleased that readers aren't opting for the lowest-value payment. If users sign up for the £2-a-week plan, they are likely to consider a longer-term option, as it automatically renews every seven days.
However, insiders still doubt Rupert Murdoch's paywall initiative. Of the readers who are "not at all likely" to pay for access, 70% said they will switch to another free news site, while 15% will continue to reading the Times and Sunday Times free headline page.
News International launched it's new-look Times and Sunday Times website at the end of May with a limited-time free preview in a bid to entice potential subscribers.
Timesonline.co.uk, which stopped operating today - users will now be re-directed to the new paid-for thetimes.co.uk site, was getting around 1.2 million visits a day in May (according to ABCe).
To me, this smacks of 'old world media' struggling to get to grips with the new media market, much in the same way that the film and music industry have failed to adapt their business models to the online world.
Source: http://mediatel.co.uk/newsline/2010/06/17/the-time...
Edited by Funk on Friday 18th June 14:18
The issue is paying for something that others offer - legitimately - for free elsewhere. There's a massive amount of 'churnalism' which is pure C&P - yet do I really consider the opinions and columns of the hacks to be worth paying to read? This will be the only unique content on the site, the rest is generic news using different words (and often slanted to influence the reader in one way or another).
The other issue becomes one of searchability and reach; with paywall sites, it'll no longer be possible to link people to stories unless they too are paying for that content. Most of the archives are, apparently, to be stripped from Google, preventing people from finding and reading their articles online.
The Times seems to be trying to make their site look like an online representation of the paper; oddly, I found this unpleasant to read. Just because it works in print doesn't mean it works on a screen.
I was a Timesonline reader, visiting most days. There were some interesting columns and articles, but nothing I would pay money to read. I'm one of the 90% who's drifted, and I won't be going back.
The other issue becomes one of searchability and reach; with paywall sites, it'll no longer be possible to link people to stories unless they too are paying for that content. Most of the archives are, apparently, to be stripped from Google, preventing people from finding and reading their articles online.
The Times seems to be trying to make their site look like an online representation of the paper; oddly, I found this unpleasant to read. Just because it works in print doesn't mean it works on a screen.
I was a Timesonline reader, visiting most days. There were some interesting columns and articles, but nothing I would pay money to read. I'm one of the 90% who's drifted, and I won't be going back.
Gaz. said:
Quite simply because 150,000 x £2 is more than 1,200,000 x £0.
It isn't 1,200,000 x £0.It was estimated that timesonline drew in ad revenue of £15-18m a year. 150,000 users paying £2/week equates to £15.6m. Sure, there will be some ad revenue from that, but advertisers won't be willing to pay massive sums to advertise to 10% of the users they were reaching before. It might be reasonable to assume ad revenue will fall in line with usage, so to perhaps £1.5-1.8m per year.
Either way, it looks like an extremely risky strategy to simply move the income from advertisers to readers.
If only 4% of the users decide to cough up, things look decidedly worse..
zac510 said:
I never thought itunes and other pay for mp3/movie sites would work either and I bet you all said that too as you were downloading the latest CD. But there is defintiely a market out there that is not tech savvy enough or keen to pirate that don't mind paying for these types of media online.
They'll be there with their iPad or similar that offers the nice payment portal through a paywall and happily pay for the news.
If you're not interested in news then you're not going to pay for it, so you can go off and read the Metro
You're not comparing apples with apples though. iTunes and 'pay' sites are legit. Torrent sites and Usenet are 'copyright infringement'.They'll be there with their iPad or similar that offers the nice payment portal through a paywall and happily pay for the news.
If you're not interested in news then you're not going to pay for it, so you can go off and read the Metro
I can read the Telegraph's site or Sky News or DM or.... None of those are 'breaking the law' by being free compared to The Times. Why would you pay for something you can get for free elsewhere?
You'd really, really have to want to read the opinions of the columnists and contributors over and above other online papers to pay Murdoch.
Edited by Funk on Friday 18th June 15:13
zac510 said:
Funk said:
advertisers won't be willing to pay massive sums to advertise to 10% of the users they were reaching before.
The advertisers will have access to a much more direct and relevant set of readers rather than a bunch of randoms linked in from blogs or twitter that they're paying to give impressions to (as you know this in turn means low click through rate).As all readers of The Times website will be registered there will be information there for demographic/behavioural marketing too, inceasing the chance of the ad actually being relevant to the reader.
So ad revenue WILL decline; and by significant margins.
Edited by Funk on Friday 18th June 15:47
Gaz. said:
Funk said:
Gaz. said:
Quite simply because 150,000 x £2 is more than 1,200,000 x £0.
It isn't 1,200,000 x £0.It was estimated that timesonline drew in ad revenue of £15-18m a year. 150,000 users paying £2/week equates to £15.6m. Sure, there will be some ad revenue from that, but advertisers won't be willing to pay massive sums to advertise to 10% of the users they were reaching before. It might be reasonable to assume ad revenue will fall in line with usage, so to perhaps £1.5-1.8m per year.
Either way, it looks like an extremely risky strategy to simply move the income from advertisers to readers.
If only 4% of the users decide to cough up, things look decidedly worse..
I think we'll see The Times fail.
tinman0 said:
10JH said:
Funk said:
It was estimated that timesonline drew in ad revenue of £15-18m a year. 150,000 users paying £2/week equates to £15.6m. Sure, there will be some ad revenue from that, but advertisers won't be willing to pay massive sums to advertise to 10% of the users they were reaching before. It might be reasonable to assume ad revenue will fall in line with usage, so to perhaps £1.5-1.8m per year.
Any idea how many adverts are they showing? The ad CPMs may rise if they think the paying audience is more valuable.Wonder how much they earnt in affiliate marketing, they seemed to have quite a few affiliate partners.
Murdoch isn't risking all by swapping £15m in ad revenue to £15m in ppv revenue. He's risking all because the ad revenue is not covering the costs of the business in the slightest and he needs to find a new model that pays.
Why go to an expensive to run ppv model, when you can run a few accounts through ad brokers and get the same revenue?
He thinks Google is 'stealing' his news, when in fact Google are actually driving more traffic to his site.
For all its faults as a paper, the Daily Mail are pushing the reasons why they're staying free:
Bullishness:-
* Half of Mail Online traffic is direct hits.
* “Digital-only display ad revenues for MailOnline are currently up 131% year on year for financial ytd.”
* Mail Online publisher Martin Clarke says he’s “gunning for the portals” and “attacking portals like MSN and Yahoo”.
* Why the site is celeb-heavy: “Choice of content is heavily influenced by real-time minute-to-minute monitoring of reader activity – while preserving core brand values.”
* Site’s readers are “MidBritons to a man and woman” - “a younger, richer version of the people who read our papers”.
On charging:-
* ”Readers will not pay to consume general news on the web.”
* “All news has traditionally been free – EXCEPT print.”
* ”People pay for the convenience of print in recognition of the special cost of production and delivery of a tangible product and because they purchase it WHOLE.”
* “Which is why they will also pay for news on mobile devices.”
* “And we will also experiment with niche paid-for web content.”
Staying free:-
* ”Like it or not, the web is free with one or two players in each sector becoming big winners.”
* “MailOnline – uniquely among UK newspaper sites - is now big enough to make the advertising model pay.”
* “Staying free also allows us to expand our news brand internationally.”
* “And protect and promote our group’s paid-for products and services.”
* ”A pay-wall MIGHT make a little money – we will make a lot.”
Pushing to print:-
* Web begets print - “78% of UK MailOnline audience do NOT buy Mail newspapers, but are exactly the kind of people who SHOULD.”
* “Mail readers who also use our website buy TWICE as many copies of the paper.”
* There’s a “focus on converting new customers to paid-for products in print and on mobile devices”.
Paper sales:-
* Mail Newspapers made about £11 million from cruise adverts in 08/09.
* Sainsbury’s sells 27 percent of all Daily Mail/Mail On Sunday copies.
* Mail circulation revenue has been growing for the last decade.
* The Mail’s circulation is falling slower than the rest of the market.
Diversified income:-
* The MailLife retail affiliate brand earned £21 million turnover at half-year - £4.7 million revenue for A&N.
* Customers used it to buy 566,000 products in 08/09, spending £31 million - it sold £3.6 million worth in wine alone.
* A&N Media says it has a database of 13.7 million contactable customers.
* Now A&N wants to connect up its whole consumer portfolio, including Metro and Loot, in this way.
Interesting stuff.
tinman0 said:
RYH64E said:
tinman0 said:
And if they can turn those into paying customers, then they are laughing all the way to the bank.
5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
How low will their market share get when you actually have to pay? I've not used the site since you had to register to view and haven't missed it at all.5% freetards vs 1.5% paying customers. I'd take the paying customers any day of the week. (Assuming the free trial will convert favourably).
Hits <> income
Guido reckons that 1.8% will halve again when they ask people to actually pay. It would be interesting to know what the final figures shake down as; revenue from paying readers and revenue from advertisers when compared with the advert revenues from a much larger reader base without paywalls.
Interesting article here: http://www.daniweb.com/news/story240694.html
Daniweb said:
Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid man, his business empire is evidence of that. For anyone to become a media mogul requires smarts, but those smarts seem to be deserting Murdoch as he continues to play the fool and deny that old monetisation methods do not work for the new online model that has so totally embraced news media.
Gord Hotchkiss over at Searchnewz says "Rupert Murdoch's rantings are so out of touch that they're bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He's mad that his old revenue model isn't working anymore" and I couldn't agree more.
When Mike Butcher at TechCrunch broke the news that Microsoft might be trying to fund a move to persuade newspapers to move from Google to Bing, a few of us blinked not so much with surprise but more a feeling of inevitability. It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up after the Financial Times published a story (behind a paywall and 9 days later, ironically enough) stating that Microsoft had discussions involving News Corp "being paid to de-index its news websites from Google". It's also something Ron Miller, right here on DaniWeb, beat the old media to the punch with if you broaden the net a little and excuse the pun.
This all comes off the back of a Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch during which he pointed out that readers who see News Corp news after arriving from a search page are of little value as far as its advertisers are concerned. Murdoch took the bait offered up by the Sky political editor when asked why he didn't make his sites invisible to Google in that case and responded with a curt "I think we will".
Murdoch is, as you would expect from a media mogul, looking for ways to make news pay. He has already proposed a highly controversial 'paywall' behind which premium news content should be made available only to those willing to pay for the privilege. You can do your own search for 'Murdoch Paywall' to see what the web thinks of that. My view on that, as a former Sunday Times columnist and having had some involvement in the first News Corp online venture (Delphi UK) is to say OK, go ahead. Market forces will prevail and if your news content is really worth it, Mr Murdoch, people will indeed pay and your media empire will not crumble and die before your very eyes.
Unfortunately I think that, in all honesty, you still don't get this new media Internet thing, and your advisors are not being helpful in illuminating your understanding it would seem. Otherwise why would you be demanding that headline link aggregators such as NewsNow stop linking to your stories?
The copyright infraction argument being used is a spurious one, linking is not stealing and in fact it is quite the opposite. Instead of reselling your content, Mr Murdoch, headline linking aggregators are pushing hundreds of thousands of readers to your stories, on your servers, every day. Now, if you cannot figure out a way to make money from this influx of readers then that is as a result of shortcomings in your business vision and should not be blamed on the very services which are delivering your readers to you.
There was an interesting post on Twitter over the weekend in which someone mused over whether Murdoch might start turning his attention to bloggers and try closing them down over fair use and news linking next. My immediate thought was it would be a silly thing to do, after all most newspaper journalists use blogs as an information source these days, and stories often break on the blogs first and are then 'discovered' by the newspapers and presented as their own scoop.
Which kind of brings us full circle back to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch breaking the Microsoft meeting story more than a week before the old media hacks got hold of it.
However, I am not quite done with this rant, because there is one more blog that is deserving of a mention here and that is TechDirt which has done a wonderful job in erecting a counter-argument to the news aggregators as parasites position in a story entitled "A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content" which examines Murdoch owned sites which appear to aggregate content from other sites and rely upon the fair use argument that Murdoch seems to think should be dismissed by the courts.
I'm guessing that at some point soon the tablets will kick in, the sabre will stop being rattled, and Murdoch will realise that cutting his hands off because he has a headache isn't going to solve anything. Just as cutting off Google isn't going to result in a sudden deluge of folk rushing to subscribe to News Corp content when they can simply use Google to find someone else reporting the same news, for free.
It is of Murdoch's making, and this article supports the 'fewer-but-more-valuable-users' stance:Gord Hotchkiss over at Searchnewz says "Rupert Murdoch's rantings are so out of touch that they're bordering on lunacy, or, at a minimum, stupidity. He's mad that his old revenue model isn't working anymore" and I couldn't agree more.
When Mike Butcher at TechCrunch broke the news that Microsoft might be trying to fund a move to persuade newspapers to move from Google to Bing, a few of us blinked not so much with surprise but more a feeling of inevitability. It took a while for the rest of the world to catch up after the Financial Times published a story (behind a paywall and 9 days later, ironically enough) stating that Microsoft had discussions involving News Corp "being paid to de-index its news websites from Google". It's also something Ron Miller, right here on DaniWeb, beat the old media to the punch with if you broaden the net a little and excuse the pun.
This all comes off the back of a Sky News interview with Rupert Murdoch during which he pointed out that readers who see News Corp news after arriving from a search page are of little value as far as its advertisers are concerned. Murdoch took the bait offered up by the Sky political editor when asked why he didn't make his sites invisible to Google in that case and responded with a curt "I think we will".
Murdoch is, as you would expect from a media mogul, looking for ways to make news pay. He has already proposed a highly controversial 'paywall' behind which premium news content should be made available only to those willing to pay for the privilege. You can do your own search for 'Murdoch Paywall' to see what the web thinks of that. My view on that, as a former Sunday Times columnist and having had some involvement in the first News Corp online venture (Delphi UK) is to say OK, go ahead. Market forces will prevail and if your news content is really worth it, Mr Murdoch, people will indeed pay and your media empire will not crumble and die before your very eyes.
Unfortunately I think that, in all honesty, you still don't get this new media Internet thing, and your advisors are not being helpful in illuminating your understanding it would seem. Otherwise why would you be demanding that headline link aggregators such as NewsNow stop linking to your stories?
The copyright infraction argument being used is a spurious one, linking is not stealing and in fact it is quite the opposite. Instead of reselling your content, Mr Murdoch, headline linking aggregators are pushing hundreds of thousands of readers to your stories, on your servers, every day. Now, if you cannot figure out a way to make money from this influx of readers then that is as a result of shortcomings in your business vision and should not be blamed on the very services which are delivering your readers to you.
There was an interesting post on Twitter over the weekend in which someone mused over whether Murdoch might start turning his attention to bloggers and try closing them down over fair use and news linking next. My immediate thought was it would be a silly thing to do, after all most newspaper journalists use blogs as an information source these days, and stories often break on the blogs first and are then 'discovered' by the newspapers and presented as their own scoop.
Which kind of brings us full circle back to Mike Butcher at TechCrunch breaking the Microsoft meeting story more than a week before the old media hacks got hold of it.
However, I am not quite done with this rant, because there is one more blog that is deserving of a mention here and that is TechDirt which has done a wonderful job in erecting a counter-argument to the news aggregators as parasites position in a story entitled "A Look At All The Sites Owned By Rupert Murdoch That 'Steal' Content" which examines Murdoch owned sites which appear to aggregate content from other sites and rely upon the fair use argument that Murdoch seems to think should be dismissed by the courts.
I'm guessing that at some point soon the tablets will kick in, the sabre will stop being rattled, and Murdoch will realise that cutting his hands off because he has a headache isn't going to solve anything. Just as cutting off Google isn't going to result in a sudden deluge of folk rushing to subscribe to News Corp content when they can simply use Google to find someone else reporting the same news, for free.
Mumbrella.com.au said:
Speers: “You’ve been particularly critical of what you call the ‘content kleptomaniacs and ‘the plagiarists’. Are you particularly talking about Google here?”
Murdoch: “The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories, just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, there’s ask.com, there’s a whole lot of people.”
Speers: “Their argument is that they’re directing traffic your way, that when somebody goes to Google and searches a topic and gets a link to a news website that’s somebody who would not otherwise go to your website.”
Murdoch: “That’s right.”
Speers: ‘So isn’t it a two-way street? Aren’t they helping you?”
Murdoch: “What’s the point of having somebody come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google? Sure we go out and say ‘hey we’ve got so many millions of visitors’ . But the fact is there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all of the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website but paying.”
Speers: “Isn’t it the job once they hit your website to keep them there? It’s got to be a good enough website for them to come back.”
Murdoch: “If they’re just search people and there are ten, 20, 50 references on that subject and they look through and see an interesting headline and hit that… when they click it, sure, they get a page of a story that’s in my paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
So good, so far. We’ve heard those moans from him before. But many have suggested he’s bluffing – after all – News Corp could always use the robots.txt protocol to tell Google not to index any given page. Up to now, he’s never really answered that point.
This time, he did…
Speers: The other argument from Google is that you could choose not to be on their search engine. You could simply refuse to be on so that when someone does do a search, your websites don’t come up – why haven’t you done that?”
Murdoch: “Well. I think we will. But that’s when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”
Which seemed to me to be a bit of a bombshell, that hadn’t had the attention it deserved when the interview was broadcast on Saturday.
I wrote about it on Monday, and embedded the interview, which was on the Sky News YouTube channel. (Note the irony, by the way of the fact that I got my content from a NewsCorp-affiliated TV network and then effectively aggregated it with the help of a Google-affialiated file sharing service).
After I flagged it up on Twitter, the story of Murdoch’s threat to Google was vigorously retweeted. And overnight it was picked up in the US. Among others, digital comment king Jason Calcanis linked to our story, describing it as “the biggest news of the year”. It also went big on content-discovery site Digg.
I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles. The Sky News interview had been viewed on YouTube more than 74,000 views (compared to a more typical for the channel 74)
It also generated comments in the triple figures on our story, mainly of the view that Murdoch was an ageing idiot who didn’t get it. As I say, I kind of agreed: without Google, how on earth will the world know what you’ve got? We talked about it in this week’s Mumbrella podcast.
But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.
The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience.
Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day.
So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course)
But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all – not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement – and persuading advertisers of the value of that.
There is however a further flaw to Murdoch’s plan- these days, many users treat Google as their navigator and home page, even when they know what they want. For instance, if I want to see The Australian’s media section online, I’ll type those words into the Google search box on my navigator’s tool bar, then click though.
But equally, there’s nothing to say that News Ltd would apply robots.txt to every page – arguably some pages could sit, visible, the other side of the pay wall.
The move still may not work. But I do believe it is nowhere near as suicidal as many people believe.
And for the first time in the last few months, I no longer wonder if Rupert’s lost it.
Tim Burrowes
Source: http://mumbrella.com.au/shock-why-murdoch-may-be-m...Murdoch: “The people who just simply pick up everything and run with it, steal our stories, just take them without payment. There’s Google, there’s Microsoft, there’s ask.com, there’s a whole lot of people.”
Speers: “Their argument is that they’re directing traffic your way, that when somebody goes to Google and searches a topic and gets a link to a news website that’s somebody who would not otherwise go to your website.”
Murdoch: “That’s right.”
Speers: ‘So isn’t it a two-way street? Aren’t they helping you?”
Murdoch: “What’s the point of having somebody come occasionally who likes a headline they see in Google? Sure we go out and say ‘hey we’ve got so many millions of visitors’ . But the fact is there’s not enough advertising in the world to go around to make all of the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people coming to our website but paying.”
Speers: “Isn’t it the job once they hit your website to keep them there? It’s got to be a good enough website for them to come back.”
Murdoch: “If they’re just search people and there are ten, 20, 50 references on that subject and they look through and see an interesting headline and hit that… when they click it, sure, they get a page of a story that’s in my paper. Who knows who they are or where they are? They don’t suddenly become loyal readers of our content.”
So good, so far. We’ve heard those moans from him before. But many have suggested he’s bluffing – after all – News Corp could always use the robots.txt protocol to tell Google not to index any given page. Up to now, he’s never really answered that point.
This time, he did…
Speers: The other argument from Google is that you could choose not to be on their search engine. You could simply refuse to be on so that when someone does do a search, your websites don’t come up – why haven’t you done that?”
Murdoch: “Well. I think we will. But that’s when we start charging. We do it already with the Wall Street Journal.”
Which seemed to me to be a bit of a bombshell, that hadn’t had the attention it deserved when the interview was broadcast on Saturday.
I wrote about it on Monday, and embedded the interview, which was on the Sky News YouTube channel. (Note the irony, by the way of the fact that I got my content from a NewsCorp-affiliated TV network and then effectively aggregated it with the help of a Google-affialiated file sharing service).
After I flagged it up on Twitter, the story of Murdoch’s threat to Google was vigorously retweeted. And overnight it was picked up in the US. Among others, digital comment king Jason Calcanis linked to our story, describing it as “the biggest news of the year”. It also went big on content-discovery site Digg.
I came in the next day to find that rather than our typical weekday 7000 or so visitors, we’d had 34,570. And they’d gone from being mostly Australian to predominantly overseas on that particular tale. We had links to the story from about 40 sites, the last time I looked. Google was listing 413 related news articles. The Sky News interview had been viewed on YouTube more than 74,000 views (compared to a more typical for the channel 74)
It also generated comments in the triple figures on our story, mainly of the view that Murdoch was an ageing idiot who didn’t get it. As I say, I kind of agreed: without Google, how on earth will the world know what you’ve got? We talked about it in this week’s Mumbrella podcast.
But do you know what? Almost without exception, those fickle new readers bounced away again after looking at that one page.
The traffic was nice as far as it went. Big traffic makes you feel special (and relieved that you’d recently upgraded your server). But it also left us with something of a dilemma. Some of our advertisers are on a cpm deal, which is relatively high, justified by our specialist industry audience.
Clearly we couldn’t really justify that to local advertisers when it’s an international audience. So we decided that our cpm advertisers could have that traffic for free, and emailed them to that effect before they started querying our startling analytics for that day.
So in this case this disloyal audience was, in all practical terms, not much good for us, or our advertisers. (Although, it will be good for us in the long term for us in SEO terms of course)
But it makes me start to wonder whether Murdoch doesn’t have a point after all – not just in the direct value of a small, but paying audience, but also in the higher level of engagement this would bring to advertisers. It then becomes a conversation about engagement – and persuading advertisers of the value of that.
There is however a further flaw to Murdoch’s plan- these days, many users treat Google as their navigator and home page, even when they know what they want. For instance, if I want to see The Australian’s media section online, I’ll type those words into the Google search box on my navigator’s tool bar, then click though.
But equally, there’s nothing to say that News Ltd would apply robots.txt to every page – arguably some pages could sit, visible, the other side of the pay wall.
The move still may not work. But I do believe it is nowhere near as suicidal as many people believe.
And for the first time in the last few months, I no longer wonder if Rupert’s lost it.
Tim Burrowes
Edited by Funk on Saturday 26th June 16:53
Down from 20m uniques (4.4% of the marketplace) to 1.5%. They're not saying how many paying subscribers they have; one suspects that Murdoch wouldn't publicly admit it if it was a failure so I guess we'll never know.
What I DO understand is the concept of paying for things - but only where you a) are unique at what you provide (eg. FT provides important financial analysis that others do not - and a large proportion of their subscriptions are bought by businesses for the benefit of their employees) or b) you do it better than anyone else (which, it can't be said, The Times or Sunday Times does).
Essentially what you're paying for is just their journos' take on things, along with weekly 'columns' from contributors. My guess is that Times die-hards will pay, but with no way 'in', they'll struggle to attract new readers and I suspect they will lose readers as they realise that they're not getting anything more than they can get elsewhere - legitimately - for free.
However...
What I DO understand is the concept of paying for things - but only where you a) are unique at what you provide (eg. FT provides important financial analysis that others do not - and a large proportion of their subscriptions are bought by businesses for the benefit of their employees) or b) you do it better than anyone else (which, it can't be said, The Times or Sunday Times does).
Essentially what you're paying for is just their journos' take on things, along with weekly 'columns' from contributors. My guess is that Times die-hards will pay, but with no way 'in', they'll struggle to attract new readers and I suspect they will lose readers as they realise that they're not getting anything more than they can get elsewhere - legitimately - for free.
However...
The Guardian said:
A disgruntled hack pings Monkey: "Among those no longer able to access the Times online content are all the freelances that contribute to the paper from outside Wapping Towers. No provision has been made to give them some sort of log-on or password so that they could, you know, do radical stuff like read their own copy, see if anyone has commented (unlikely, obviously, since no one will be reading it) or even read what they wrote last week. I know. I am one." Oops.
Edited by Funk on Sunday 11th July 22:20
hornetrider said:
Chaps.
This thread was quite interesting until the major internet advertising derailment/argument.
That is all.
Agreed. I know it's contrary to expectations on PH, but could we veer wildly back on-topic...? This thread was quite interesting until the major internet advertising derailment/argument.
That is all.
This was an interesting read:
paidContent:UK said:
For all the scepticism about The Times’ paywalls, one must properly define what “success” would be for the project. Murdoch is not trying to re-invent all of web culture, and the papers know that their audience will be decimated. This is about living within their means, courting their core existing readerships to stem big losses...
So exactly how much money could the strategy bring in?
Our Times poll last month probably gives the best template we have for indication, since we asked readers themselves…
Their answers can be mapped against the last audience figure Times Online disclosed of 20,418,256 unique browsers per month (ABCe: February 2010).
First, since The Times is effectively blocking search engines from stories, let’s focus only on direct visitors, which account for 31 percent of most UK newspaper sites’ traffic, according to the Newspaper Marketing Agency. This reduces the audience to 6,329,659 a month.
So let’s see how things might pan out behind the wall…
That would make Times Newspapers £3.6 million per month or £43.29 million a year—nearly a tenth of the publisher’s 2008/09 income, and enough to halve its annual loss of £87.7 million.
This would make The Times and Sunday Times amongst the world’s most successful paid news sites - perhaps more so than FT.com, whose approximately 126,000 subscribers, paying up to £5.49 a week, we estimate make FT Group £35.9 million a year.
But, with the best will in the world, it’s hard to imagine things happening this way.
On these figures, the group of four percent (253,186) which declares itself extremely likely to pay is double even FT.com’s subscriber base. And that’s without considering other readers who may pay less frequently, the total for which would put it ahead even of WSJ.com’s million-plus subscription customers.
On this logic, The Times would also be comparing favourably with TimesSelect, the premium programme The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) shut in 2007, saying it earned $10 million after two years.
Whatever; even assuming a half or quarter of this estimation, Times Newspapers will have brought in something to offset its losses. It’s that on which the publisher will eventually have to be judged.
http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-how-much-money-could-the-times-paywall-bring-in/So exactly how much money could the strategy bring in?
Our Times poll last month probably gives the best template we have for indication, since we asked readers themselves…
Their answers can be mapped against the last audience figure Times Online disclosed of 20,418,256 unique browsers per month (ABCe: February 2010).
First, since The Times is effectively blocking search engines from stories, let’s focus only on direct visitors, which account for 31 percent of most UK newspaper sites’ traffic, according to the Newspaper Marketing Agency. This reduces the audience to 6,329,659 a month.
So let’s see how things might pan out behind the wall…
That would make Times Newspapers £3.6 million per month or £43.29 million a year—nearly a tenth of the publisher’s 2008/09 income, and enough to halve its annual loss of £87.7 million.
This would make The Times and Sunday Times amongst the world’s most successful paid news sites - perhaps more so than FT.com, whose approximately 126,000 subscribers, paying up to £5.49 a week, we estimate make FT Group £35.9 million a year.
But, with the best will in the world, it’s hard to imagine things happening this way.
On these figures, the group of four percent (253,186) which declares itself extremely likely to pay is double even FT.com’s subscriber base. And that’s without considering other readers who may pay less frequently, the total for which would put it ahead even of WSJ.com’s million-plus subscription customers.
On this logic, The Times would also be comparing favourably with TimesSelect, the premium programme The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) shut in 2007, saying it earned $10 million after two years.
Whatever; even assuming a half or quarter of this estimation, Times Newspapers will have brought in something to offset its losses. It’s that on which the publisher will eventually have to be judged.
Worth noting that the article mentions only 'direct readership' of which I was one - I wouldn't get there through a search engine. However, even as one of those 'direct readers', I haven't been back.
Edited by Funk on Tuesday 13th July 10:50
Right, FFS you lot - can we please bring an interesting media experiment thread back on-topic?
My only comment on the issue of affiliate tracking etc is that Frankeh is broadly correct, no matter how he put his point across.
Now, please, back to the original discussion..
My only comment on the issue of affiliate tracking etc is that Frankeh is broadly correct, no matter how he put his point across.
Now, please, back to the original discussion..
Edited by Funk on Tuesday 13th July 19:24
turbobloke said:
Funk said:
Right, FFS you lot - can we please bring an interesting media experiment thread back on-topic?
My only comment on the issue of affiliate tracking etc is that Frankeh is broadly correct, no matter how he put his point across.
Now, please, back to the original discussion..
Well done for being appointed moderator, and also for your amazing psychic powers which, like most of the rest of the crap RYH64E waded through, happen to be of the same texture. My only comment on the issue of affiliate tracking etc is that Frankeh is broadly correct, no matter how he put his point across.
Now, please, back to the original discussion..
Having waded through it myself I'm not inclined to continue it either, only because it's pointless entering debate with those who substitute issues they're correct on for the one they were losing the debate over, then use faith and reasoning by assertion rather than rational debate, finally resortomg to insults and
At least what I said about hairy is true and if he wishes to dispute it I'll be sorely tempted to trawl through the bilge previously posted in 'arguments' long lost and paste up a few pearls. Hopefully it won't be necessary, in any case after contemplating it all once again I might need to take a breather after laughing so much.
Meanwhile to all those with interesting internet lives and gazillions of tracking cookies to prove it, congratulations for something or other. Hopefully now Funk's wish will come true and it's back to The Times and paywalls.
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