The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics(For Dinosaur Media It May Be the End of the Beginning)

Clay Shirky ^ | November 8, 2010 | Clay Shirky

[lbryce]

In early July, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation placed its two London-based “quality” dailies, the Times and Sunday Times, behind a paywall, charging £1 for 24 hours access, or £2 a week (after an introductory £1 for the first month.*) At the same time, News Corp also forbad the UK’s Audit Bureau of Circulations from reporting site traffic*, so that no meaningful measure of the paywall’s effect was available.

That situation has now been partially reversed, with News reporting some of its own numbers: they claim 105,000 total transactions for digital content between July and October.* (Several people have wrongly reported this as 105,000 users. The number of users is smaller, as there can be more than one transaction per user.) News Corp notes that about half of those transactions were one-offs, meaning only about 50,000 transactions in those four months were by people with any commitment to the site longer than a single day.

Because that 50K number includes not just web site transactions, but Kindle and iPad sales as well, web subscribers are, at best, in the low tens of thousands. However, we don’t know how small the digital subscriber number is, for two reasons. First, the better the Kindle and iPad numbers are, the worse the web numbers are. Second, News did not report, for example, whether a loyal reader from July to October would count as a single transaction or several consecutive transactions. (If iPad sales are good, and loyal users create multiple transactions, then monthly web subscribers could be under 10,000.)

[lbryce]

All this nonsense about setting up Paywells will only serve to isolate, hasten the Dinosaur Media's demise, their only benefit is that they will be put out of their misery that much sooner. Why the New York Slimes thinks the second time around erecting their Paywall will have them fare any better is simply all a matter of desperation.

Albert Einstein said it very well among other things he said very ,very well;insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

[iopscusa]

Murdoch will loose a bit of his stash but never succeed in pay walling his media properties unless he can buy off 100% of the bureaucrats. I made the mistake of renewing a WSJ subscription but will not do so again.taking a year sub

[relictele]

I do miss my Times/Sunday Times but have avoided the site in order to convince them to abandon the policy.

[relictele]

A competitor takes a dry eyed view:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005961/times-paywall-its-still-early-days-but-what-do-the-numbers-say/

[Rocky]

I would hate to be heavily invested in the Dinosaur Media.