Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
100,000 people is pathetic.
Note that this is not subscribers - this is "the total amount of people who have paid in one way or another". 50,000 of those are subscribers, which in PR-speak probably means "people who have subscribed" i.e. not the current amount of subscribers.
With an in-built audience of over a million in circulation, plus a reach that goes far beyond that, an ad campaign AND the novelty value of "new", getting less than 0.5% of your audience to pay for online (it's not even 0.5% - some [most?] of these people have an online subscription because of their print subscription) means either a piss-poor job is being done converting users, or this business model is a dud.
The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.
It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.
Part of the reason for the difference is that The Guardian on-line audience is larger and generally more engaged than that of The Times. Part of this is because The Guardian have been very forward thinking by newspaper standards in their use of the web, but it's also because they have a younger more technology aware audience than The Times which tends to be older. There are ways of addressing this (for instance The Daily Mail on-line is a very different beast to it's paper version with a very different audience - one all pictures of pretty ladies in short skirts, the other righteous indignation at such moral outrages as pretty ladies in short skirts) but it's core following was always going to be harder to convert.
Also remember that subscription doesn't mean zero ad revenue. The Financial Times gets just under £30m a year from advertising on-line despite being a subscription only service. Part of that is down to the fact that they appeal to a very specific, target-able demographic but that would also be true of The Times to a lesser degree.
All of this doesn't make what The Times has done right or wrong, I'm just saying it's not as cut and dried as Rory Cellan-Jones implies. It's early days for The Times and I wouldn't write it off quite yet.
P.S. The iPad app is still a subscription as are the Kindle downloads. They're all revenue for the electronic content so I think it's fair to count it.
It may be that these free iPad downloads aren't included in the figure of 105k "sales" - I can't tell from any of the coverage I've seen.
You have no idea how much it costs to get certain types of "news". Try getting streaming broadcasts for 99% of the conferences that are not computing related. It's nigh near impossible and it costs much.
I'll bet the type of news you're willing to pay for isn't aimed at the general public. I reckon sites that will do well behind a paywall are either specialist sites or industry specific sites or even sites that offer time sensitive information first. The kind of sites that either offer quality information or hold a monopoly on this information. They also won't price this for the general public they'll price it for the corporations.
I can give you a single data point - I used to read The Times online most days, not generally very much. I'd skip to the letters to sample the public mood, pick the top stories and view the World and UK front pages. I have missed it, but I can't afford to pay, i.e. it's not a high enough priority to warrant the money (but I'm an outlier with respect to payment power).
I use Google News now, kinda. It doesn't really hit the mark, I do occasionally look at other papers - Guardian, Telegraph, Mail (rarely), Independent - but generally I'm relying on social sites to get news. I miss The Times, I grew up reading it, but Google News is OK along with one of the other broadsheets.
The BBC bias always annoys me. I expect commercial interests to have, well, commercial interests but somehow the BBC never really hits the mark. I do read news there about once a fortnight and find their news reviews to be very thorough.
I can give you a single data point - I used to read The Times online most days, not generally very much. I'd skip to the letters to sample the public mood, pick the top stories and view the World and UK front pages. I have missed it, but I can't afford to pay, i.e. it's not a high enough priority to warrant the money (but I'm an outlier with respect to payment power).
I use Google News now, kinda. It doesn't really hit the mark, I do occasionally look at other papers - Guardian, Telegraph, Mail (rarely), Independent - but generally I'm relying on social sites to get news. I miss The Times, I grew up reading it, but Google News is OK along with one of the other broadsheets.
Somehow the BBC never really hits the mark, I find their bias a bit annoying too. I do read news there about once a fortnight and find their news reviews to be very thorough.
Worst data point ever, probably.
I've seen this before even when subscriptions for a news site was actually very good but potential advertising from page views would be better. (TimesSelect/The New York Times)
Great example is SyFy channel show ratings, they put out press releases focusing on certain measures in which certain eps of shows performed favorably even if overall the ratings aren't that good.
My Dad rang me a few years ago and was like "hey, just bought iTunes, do they email me a download link?" and I was confused - what did he mean bought? It's free from Apple.
Turns out he google'd "iTunes download" and clicked the first result (an adword) and paid £25 for iTunes. I later actually met a guy that ran this scam, he said he made thousands each month. (Apple/Google has cracked down on this recently)
My point is, if you have thetimes.co.uk as your homepage, and you trust that for news - if one day you're asked to pay £1/month or whatever, would non internet savvy users just pay it? I expect quite a few would.
However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.
that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over.
not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.
What IS interesting though is the potential to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company).
The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.
Edit: My blog gets 500-1000 unique readers per day, roughly one post per day, which is now around 0.5% - 1% of the readership of a major newspaper's website.
They think fame and riches! Or at least having the intellectual satisfaction of bestowing upon the world their opinion... but without revenue they cannot reach out to an audience, they cannot fund deep investigations, they cannot travel, and nor can they inspire confidence in whatever readership happens to stumble across them.
(The last one probably is solvable with a recommendation/aggregation service for new/independent journalists).
It is of course phenomenally hard to get people to pay for anything on the Web, especially news and opinions. But this is where it's worth drawing a comparison with Diaspora's funding: that $200,000 in donations is remarkable yet understandable, because a certain group of people want to support "big ideas" and freedoms... especially those with a political edge (and nothing is so overtly political as the freedom of the press, in Jefferson's words: "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.").
"The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result."
So some of those people who they are counting as having "subscribed" to the paywalled content might not even have an internet connection.
What are the total number of print subscribers? Im guessing it's a pretty large proportion of that figure.
The statement made it clear that 100,000 is the subscribers who have activated the digital element of their subscription (about 70% of the total possible).
And, connection problems aside, are you satisfied enough with the service to continue paying for it?
The cost is worth the fact that I find the articles much more...enjoyable(I'm not entirely sure that's the best word!).
Connection problems aside, I have been satisfied with the service. If I hadn't been a Times reader before, I don't think there's anything there that would persuade me to pay for it, but to me, the cost is worth it.
My main problem with the paper is the fact that many of its news articles are enthused with a relatively large dollop of opinion - and quite often the opinion that's being touted, specifically aligns with points of view which are directly beneficial to Rupert Murdoch's business aims.
His media properties do his bidding on a regular basis; the blatant conflict of interests on display, regularly disgusts me.
So you want to continue to read content from a media outlet that has an agenda from a particular political perspective AND you consider this an important part of your day.
I'm sorry but I have to respectfully disagree with your methods of thinking. Doesn't this make you blind to anything else out there?
I'm not sure what your political views are, but if you are left-leaning, how much Fox News do you watch? If you tend towards the right then do you read The Guardian and/or HuffPost?