Friday, October 01, 2010

The Huge Success of the Times Paywall



This is a tweet from @mattrcb

Difference between free media & paywall media: Iain Dale links to me: 2,651
hits. The Times links to me: 8 hits

Interesting.

10 comments:

IanVisits said...

Depends on how you define "success" though.

Sadly, lots of inbound clicks from a website doesn't automatically translate into money in the bank account.

I suspect The Times is more interested in the financial issue than in how many clicks a link delivers.

Rick Nobinson said...

2600 hits, assuming unique at £10 CPM, £25.

6 Visitors, fraction of £1/week, 10p per user, 60p?

hmmm..

Regards,

Tom

Guy de Ferrer said...

An alternative explanation, though hardly plausible, is that Times subscribers are more discerning!

Anonymous said...

And the plain English award goes to...Rick Nobinson

Opinicus said...

Murdoch has done the newspaper industry another favour but they hate him so much they can't or won't take the hint.

All the cost of newpapers is in paper and distribution. Moving over to the web makes every sense as the use of the internet is ever more widespread. But there has to be a charge albeit less than for the paper edition. He is never going to make any money from the web until all major newspapers charge. That doesnt bother him; he has only a little extra cost from making his papers content online and he can wait for the rest of fleet street to take its socks off and do the higher maths involved.

Personally, I would not make it available online at all but turn the paper into a pdf file and email it daily to all subscribers in time for breakfast.

Murdoch is a republican, alien sh1t but much as I love to see him mocked, I dont think anyone knows more about the newspaper business

Matt said...

The problem is that Murdoch knows a lot about the newspaper industry -as it relates to the 1960and 1970s.

Libertarian said...

@Opinicus

You are right Murdoch knows a lot about the newspaper business. My local newspaper and one of the oldest and biggest privately owned newspaper groups know a lot about the newspaper business.

There's only one drawback, there isn't going to be a newspaper business for much longer as it's rationale and model are now defunct.

Any journalist or opinion writer worth her or his salt should quit their paper asap and set up a monetised through adverts and possibly a freemium model blog.

Any journo out there who wants to see how that would work, treble their income and how to get plugged into the global breaking news through crowd sourced stories let me know and I'll show you

Anonymous said...

How does a solo journalist blogger run stories like exposing the cricket betting scandal?

I am not sure the 'paper' 'paper is dead yet.

George said...

I think the Times is very interested in how many "inbound clicks" it is getting from people like me who no longer bother being insulted by its paywall. You are a strange man, Mr IanVisits.

Libertarian said...

@trevorsden

"How does a solo journalist blogger run stories like exposing the cricket betting scandal?"

Easy, there are now ways of 1) Finding instant breaking news as it happens 2) Gaining whistleblower, inside info and other types of story at incredibly low cost.

As newspapers now rely almost exclusively on expensive wire services for 99% of the churnalism we currently get the same old same old in all the papers. The really juicy stories like Cricket betting, MP's expenses, East Anglian climate data fraud are always tip offs/individual journalists investigations. And being self employed doesn't change that by one iota.

Any journo/blogger with a story like those is sitting on a gold mine as these stories will also be syndicated by radio/TV and magazine news


Trust me newspapers in their present format are as dead as a dodo.