The Internet: Lack of Competition
Schachinger: A lack of competition tramples our privacy, is closing the open Internet; http://eicker.at/Competition
Tagged: News Corporation Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Daily
Helmore, Guardian: Rupert Murdoch creates iPad–only iNewspaper, the Daily, with the help of Steve Jobs; http://eicker.at/Daily
Gerrit Eicker
Times Paywall III.
News Corp: The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date; http://eicker.at/Times
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Gerrit Eicker
News Corp: “News International today announces that the new digital products for The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date. – Around half of these are monthly subscribers. These include subscribers to the digital sites as well as subscribers to The Times iPad app and Kindle edition. Many of the rest are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. – In addition to the digital-only subscribers, there are 100,000 joint digital/print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the websites and/or iPad app since launch. – As a result, the total paid audience for digital products on The Times and The Sunday Times is close to 200,000 (allowing for some duplication in the digital customer sales number).”
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Gerrit Eicker
pC: “From a pre-paywall readership of 20 million unique monthly users, to a base of 105,000 cumulative reader payments in the last four months, The Times has encouraged just 0.5 percent of its online audience at most to pay. – Consider that only half of these subscribe, as opposed to pay per day, and you see that just 0.25 percent of The Times’ online audience have become regular customers. – It sounds ‘disastrous’, as the naysayers would put it. But then, The Times is not operating a freemium service, and it has made a grand, long-term strategic readjustment in its conception of the role of readers between its output and its income – from ‘visitors’ to ‘customers’…”
NYT: “Another question is what effect, if any, the pay walls are having on the print editions of The Times and Sunday Times. Paid circulation of the daily paper fell about 3 percent from June through September, to about 487,000, while sales of the Sunday paper rose by about half of 1 percent, to nearly 1.1 million.”
Gerrit Eicker
Außenpluralismus
Ruß-Mohl über Medien: Wie wir [den] Außenpluralismus künftig sichern wollen, ist die Gretchenfrage; http://j.mp/d16ati
Gerrit Eicker
WSJ vs. Media Business
Jarvis: I do not understand how the WSJ could be so naive about the basics of modern media business; http://j.mp/bBRzYt
Gerrit Eicker
Times Paywall II.
Times Paywalls: 150,000 registrations during free trial period, 15,000 subscribers, a disappointment; http://j.mp/bVTjxD
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Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show. … There are approximately 150,000 Times print subscribers who get a free online registration, but if the estimated 15,000 daily online users who agreed to pay opt for the £2 a week deal, the paywall will generate £120,000 a month – £1.4m a year. … Sabbagh goes on to calculate that the typical Times print reader is worth ‘at least two and a half times’ the average online reader.”
Gerrit Eicker
Times Paywall
Hitwise: The Times paywall results in a steep loss of market share, traffic already (no payment yet); http://j.mp/c5r2cx
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Gerrit Eicker
Hitwise: “Following months of speculation, News International has finally erected a paywall around the Times newspaper website. After a couple of weeks running two sites, (http://www.timesonline.co.uk and http://www.thetimes.co.uk) in parallel, visitors to the former site are now automatically redirected to the latter. Since last Tuesday, users have had to register to read content on the Times website (as well the separate Sunday Times site). However, they don’t yet have to pay: during the trial period, which is expected to last until the end of the month, simply having registered is enough to access the content behind the paywall. … So, its still early days, but the conclusion so far seems to be this: since it forced users to register in order to view its content, the Times has lost market share. However, this decline has clearly not been catastrophic and none of the paper’s rivals has particularly benefitted. Yet. The real test will come when people actually have to pay rather than simply register to view the Times’ content.“
Gerrit Eicker
iPad: Publishing Dreams?
Miller, News Corp: The iPad is not a communications device, it is a media consumption device; http://j.mp/9Y6cL1
Gerrit Eicker
Paid Content: Rusbridger vs. Murdoch
Murdoch: pay walls for all newspaper Web sites this year vs. Rusbridger: bad idea for journalism; http://j.mp/9naeEY
Gerrit Eicker
Advertising Survives
Jarvis: I do not think advertising is dead. I think it is dying for mass companies; http://j.mp/8SZuH2
Helmore, Guardian: “Rupert Murdoch, head of the media giant News Corp, and Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, are preparing to unveil a new digital ‘newspaper’ called the Daily at the end of this month, according to reports in the US media. – The collaboration, which has been secretly under development in New York for several months, promises to be the world’s first ‘newspaper’ designed exclusively for new tablet-style computers such as Apple’s iPad, with a launch planned for early next year.”
Carr, NYT: “With The Daily, the News Corporation can enter the digital newsstand business in earnest with a new product that was never free on the Web and in a format for which payments are easily made. When I am on a Web browser and I bump into a pay wall, I reflexively pull back unless it is in front of something I really must have. But when I’m in the App Store on an iPad, I’m already in a commercial environment: pushing the button to spend small money on something I’d like to see or play with doesn’t seem like such a sucker’s bet. … It seems sensible to wonder: who is going to bring old habits to a new environment? The people who own or will buy an iPad have become used to a Web browser as their prism on the news, not a newspaper and its editors. The Daily will have a separate opinion section, which will seem wildly anachronistic to readers who have grown up reading news and point-of-view analysis in the same piece of digital journalism. ”
Schonfeld, TC: “From a reader’s perspective, the optimal iPad newspaper should be three things. Social: It should show you what your friends and the people you trust are reading and passing around, both within that publication and elsewhere on the Web. – Realtime: News breaks every second, and publications need to be as realtime as possible to keep up. A ‘daily’ already sounds too slow. – Local: The device knows where you are and should serve up news and information accordingly, including, weather, local news and reviews.”
TNW: “What may come as a bigger surprise is that The Guardian is claiming the project is a collaboration between Murdoch and Apple’s Steve Jobs. That’s the first we’ve heard of Jobs’ involvement and so until we hear confirmation from Apple itself, we’re not convinced. We’re sceptical because you would assume Jobs would be aware of the flood of ‘conflict of interest‘ complaints from competing iPad publications if Apple were to invest in a publication for a platform it entirely controls.”
CNET: “Apple’s role in this interesting enterprise seems to rest in offering engineering expertise, and, of course, the existence of many millions of iPads waiting to host the new iPado-o-newsthingy. … The question remains, though, as to how this iPad-o-newsthingy will be presented to the world. Will there be some concerted advertising campaign, perhaps prepared in conjunction with Apple? Will there be star writers hired whose mere name will force a significant number of the population to toss their 99 cents into the fray? (The former editor of the New York Post Page 6, Richard Johnson is, for example, already said to be on the team.)”