Felix Salmon responds to John Gapper’s Financial Times column Charge for news or bleed red ink, in which Gapper suggests that while only a small number of New York Times readers may sign up for subscriptions under its forthcoming charging model, this would provide a significant revenue boost.
Salmon goes ‘through the numbers’ and writes:
With the New York Times Company making the best part of $300 million a year from online advertising, it’s hard to see that the extra revenue boost would really be worth it.
The point here is that with the powerhouse NYTimes.com site front and center, the New York Times Company as a whole is a major online media player, serving up billions of high-prestige page views and building strong relationships with every major online advertiser and media buyer in the country. Even under the most optimistic scenario, a majority of the NYT’s loyal readers will desert it when it moves to a paywall. And with those readers gone, media buyers are by no means guaranteed to stick around.
Update: New York Times confirms it will bring in new charging system from January 2011.
Having already pioneered and seemingly abandoned charging for its website, is the New York Times about to introduce a new pay wall or Financial Times style metering system for its website?
According to the Daily Intel, a new access model will be brought in within a matter of weeks. (Note that in November last year a pay wall decision for the times was also scheduled for “within weeks”, but didn’t emerge.)
On paidContent.org, James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, looks at how paid content on NYTimes.com might work and what the Times should be looking at when building a wall.
But, McQuivey adds:
Notice that this advice is directed to NYTimes.com and nobody else. Because there is no other newspaper that we believe can pull this off at this time, even though a majority of newspaper editors are considering it.
How will website traffic measurement be affected by the introduction of pay walls? Suzanne Bearne considers the impact on UK newspaper websites audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe).
This morning’s Today Programme discusses pay walls with BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones; Emily Bell, director of digital content at the Guardian; and Roger Parry, former chair of Johnston Press.
Johnston Press is – from this morning – to start charging for web access to some of its regional newspapers.
Cellan-Jones says it will be a ‘real test of the appetite of readers to actually pay for what’s online’.
Emily Bell makes the distinction between ‘paid content’ and ‘pay walls’; while she is sceptical about the future success of pay walls, people might be willing to pay for an iPhone app, for example, she says.
Further to yesterday’s news from the Financial Times that Microsoft is considering paying for news content to appear on its search engine Bing (in a ‘web pact’ with News International), Channel 4 News last night debated the potential impact this could have on the market.
Krishnan Guru-Murphy discussed with paidContent:UK editor, Robert Andrews, and head of social media at global media agency Mindshare, Ciarán Norris.
Josh Halliday digests former Daily Mirror editor David Banks’ thoughts on bloggers, pay walls and ‘aggregationists’, given in a guest lecture to Sunderland University students.
Weighing in on the pay wall debate, Banks had some strong views – the choicest quote being:
“Everybody talks about paying to break through the paywall, I don’t know anyone who quite knows how Rupert plans to do this. Nobody talks about it, they just say ‘Oh yeah, well if Rupert says it then it’ll work’.”
Something for those media executives considering building pay walls around their content, Matt Busse details how to read the WSJ for free using Google.
“Oh, and this isn’t new. It’s been an open secret since at least March 2008,” adds Busse.
NMA has more details on News International’s pay wall plans – Times Online is reportedly set to introduce the system in Q1 next year, while dates for The Sun and News of the World are undecided.
The Times website will also have a redesign next year as part of the changes.
“A source close to News International said because users will be charged to access the title, the site won’t focus on generating page impressions. It will be overhauled with a focus on a rich user experience, with content easier to find, and building greater user interaction. It’s also planning to run more live debates across the site, such as a recent discussion about the BNP,” writes NMA.
Following his comments last month in which he described aggregators as ‘kleptomaniacs’ and ‘plagiarists’, Rupert Murdoch has suggested News Corp could remove its sites from Google’s index.
Speaking in an interview with Australia’s Sky News (video below): “I think we will [remove our content from Google’s index]. But that’s when we start charging.”
As Mumbrella explains: “Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users’ search results.”
In the interview, Murdoch also discusses what could be put behind potential news site pay walls.