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
Guide to most common (Web) fonts on Windows, Mac, Linux: serif, sans-serif; http://eicker.at/WebFonts (via Design Tagebuch)
Times Paywalls: 150,000 registrations during free trial period, 15,000 subscribers, a disappointment; http://j.mp/bVTjxD
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.”
Hitwise: The Times paywall results in a steep loss of market share, traffic already (no payment yet); http://j.mp/c5r2cx
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.“
British arm of News Corp.: Times and Sunday Times begin charging readers using its Web sites in June; http://j.mp/a1OK46
Murdoch: pay walls for all newspaper Web sites this year vs. Rusbridger: bad idea for journalism; http://j.mp/9naeEY
Gerrit Eicker 09:57 on 2. November 2010 Permalink |
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).”
Gerrit Eicker 18:44 on 2. November 2010 Permalink |
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.”