The Times they are a-chargin’. After months of speculation, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation has revealed details of the paywall which will go around its Times and Sunday Times websites.
A new look and a new paywall: the Sunday Times website
From this month the Times Online site, which merged content from the two newspapers, will split into two separate sites – thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk. Then next month their content will disappear behind a paywall.
As paywalls go, it is an iron curtain: no freebies, no tiered access models, no free journalist blogs or email newsletters. Access will cost:
- £1 (“the same price as paying for the newspaper in a shop Monday to Friday”) for a 24-hour pass or
- £2 (“less than the cost of a cup of coffee”) per week
Naturally enough, their FAQs emphasise the added value in all this - videos, interactive features, exclusive content, member deals with Times+ (“free film screenings, private views… upgrades, money-saving offers, gifts and much more”). Dig a little deeper, and “sustainability” and “investment” are the other big buzzwords.
‘Investing in journalism’
Interviewed yesterday on Sky News (another Murdoch outlet), the Times editor James Harding said: “If we don’t figure out a way of creating a sustainable footing for the journalism of the Times, we’re going to see the investment we make just disappear.”
“We won’t be able to keep our reporters in Afghanistan or Iraq – this week we sent someone to the Gulf of Mexico to see what the (Deepwater Horizon) oil spill was really doing there – that kind of investment in journalism, we simply won’t be able to make.
“When you look at the common approach at the moment, which is just giving away your journalism for free and treating it as worthless, we don’t think that’s sustainable.”– Times editor James Harding on Sky News
Added extras on the Times websites: will they ensure a high enough conversion rate?
In the same Sky report, though, Alexander Ross from media law firm Wiggin and Entertainment Media Research pointed to a new survey by his company.
Paywalls were “probably a flawed business model”, he said. “People really are not prepared to pay a subscription – they’re prepared to pay on a one-off basis.”
So who is right? At first glance it seems down to what kind of conversion rate would make the Times model viable. The Wiggin survey of 1,500 active online consumers found that only 10% of readers would be willing to pay that level of fee.
Nick Forrester’s blog on Forrester has a more conservative estimate: half that take-up, with around two-thirds of the readers outside the UK.
“Advertisers locally will be left with a readership of around 20k,” he concludes. “Advertisers may say they value engagement over scale, but will they actually come on board? Even if current revenues are disappointing, they are going to be hit hard by such a diminution of scale.”
Falling online audiences
So higher revenue from subscriptions have to be counterbalanced by falling audiences – and falling online ad revenues. Anecdotal evidence from blogs and the twittersphere is that most readers take a dim view of the Times’s pay-to-view model. The reaction in the visitors’ comments in the same Sky News story on the web was overwhelmingly negative.
Competitors may scoop up the disaffected, and the London Independent, under new Russian owner Alexander Lebedev, may try a more radical approach such as free print and online.
Some newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have specialist audiences or a quasi-monopolistic position, and can charge almost as much as they like for their digital content. But most newspapers have no such luxury. Some have flip-flopped between free and paywall or ended up with hybrid models in between.
Irish newspapers and hybrid models
In Ireland, Independent News and Media introduced paywalls on its regional titles’ sites last March, though its national titles currently remain free.
Meanwhile the Irish Times charges for archive articles more than a year old (€10 for 24 hours to €395 a year) and recently introduced subscriptions for its “ePaper” – (€ 1.80 for a single issue, €9 a month or €89 a year). But it dislikes the term “paywalls”, as it still gives away contemporary content.
The Guardian has built itself into a major global brand using another kind of hybrid model: paid-for newspapers, paid-for iPhone apps, paid-for conferences, paid-for sponsorship, paid-for advertising, but totally free web content.
As we reported last month, senior Guardian executive Meg Pickard believes journalism in the Internet era is about expanding the channels, not hiding content behind paywalls. As her colleague Emily Bell puts it, the paywall debate isn’t just a pragmatic one but about what kind of relationship you build with your readers:
“To stimulate a market for news, you need an engaged population, so perhaps the news business needs to think harder about creating engagement rather than merely encouraging consumption. I am happy to be proved wrong, but I still find it hard to understand how deliberately downsizing your audience is ever going to help with the broader problem.”
The news grazer
Meanwhile newspapers struggling to survive within this rapidly changing landscape have to deal with a new kind of reader: the “news grazer”.
The latest annual report on US journalism from the Pew Internet & American Life Project tracks this growing phenomenon. It shows that:
- On a typical day, nearly half of Americans now get news from four to six different platforms, including online, TV and print
- The online grazers tend to visit multiple news sources
- The majority (57%) rely mostly on two to five websites
- Most also use a news aggregator such as Google News or Yahoo News
- Of the top 199 most-trafficked news sites, two thirds (67%) are still associated with old media, and account for 66% of the traffic
- More than a quarter of adults now commonly access the Internet on their phones and PDAs, adding yet another layer of change in consumers’ relationship with news
“How they interact with the news, what they are most likely to learn there, and what they do in response, are different in the digital space than it is in older platforms. It is making news more portable, perpetual, personalised and participatory,” the report concludes.
