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Comment by fookyong | Hacker News Reader

I'm calling a spade a spade.

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.

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I agree. The BBC have more analysis here - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010...

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.

His figures may not be right though. I've seen other articles quote much lower figures than the £40m - closer to £25m (http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-is-financial-times-the-...). For comparison that article also quotes that at the time the Times was pulling in £15m - £18m from on-line ad revenue.

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.

The Times iPad app is currently free - I think it has been for a while - so it may be that people are downloading it for the 30 day trial, with no intention of continuing when the charge kicks in, so possibly it's not going to be a big revenue generator in terms of subs or advertising.

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.

Two more analysis:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2010/nov/02/tim...

http://www.beehivecity.com/newspapers/times-paywall-105000-d...

And who in their right mind would pay £1 for a 'one day pass'? This isn't porn, it's just news.

I paid up to $150/day for 1-day passes for some sort of "news".

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.

The difference is that the Times and Sunday Times are aimed at the public. There's plenty of competition and free on-line quality alternatives in the UK from the BBC News Website and the Guardian. What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

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.

>What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

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.

>What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.

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 doubt people would regularly buy day passes of non-niche news.

I suspect it's there in large part as a psychological "trick" to make the £2 charge for a week seem good value in comparison, and thus - in theory - make people be more inclined to sign up for that.

My guess would be, the same people who pay £1 for a 'one day newspaper'. I can't think of another group that would be more likely to do so.

porn has much, much less value then a lot of information. Supply and demand, and the supply of porn is seemingly endless.

You can call it all you want, but it sure works better for them than giving out freebies.

Actually it doesn't. The potential advertising revenue probably exceeds the revenue from subscriptions.

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)

I would imagine there are adverts as well. These readers are very valuable to advertisers. 150K well-to-do readers trumps a couple million freeloaders any day.

Edit: Fine, I rescind my sass.

Is Google a newspaper?

Do we know this? You would need to see the change in advertising revenue between before this was implemented and now. You also have to factor in the rate of growth in readership to before and after.

I don't know that, but they probably do know themselves. They claim it to be net success, and the only contrary theory out there is they must be rigging numbers. Unless you're Doctorow you'd want some evidence for that.

Well without a way to independently check this kind of thing there is no way to know I guess, it's pretty easy to make the statistics work in your favor to explain later why you could have said something was a success when it wasn't.

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.

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