Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
bbc.co.ukI'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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I wonder how many of these users paid for news because they didn't realize they could go elsewhere?
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.
I think it's less likely. My grandmother wouldn't have heard of iTunes, or know what an "mp3" is, so if she learned about it she wouldn't realise it was just one of multiple options.
However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.
Much better than I had thought they might be, was hearing 7000 UUs a week bandied around before. (that said, with enough churn 7000 UUs could make 100,000+ total users since live).
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.
This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting to see how the numbers sustain.
Yep: £1 for 30 days trial. I think it's very suspicious that such a high number is published in the middle of this campaign. I would rather have them release their figures >1 month after the end of the campaign.
There's also adverts all over the tube (metro) in London, they're really pushing it.
It's notable that they expect to "lose 90%" of those subscribers when they end the current "£1 for a month" introductory offer, which is being pushed by a huge celebrity-endorsed advertising campaign on the London underground. So the actual figure is nearer 10,000 subscribers.
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.
But don't you think this niche is already filled by bloggers, who are (mostly) working for nothing.
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.
I'm not convinced most bloggers start blogging with the assumption they'll do it for nothing :)
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.").
I don't understand the numbers here. They report 105,000 electronic-only subscribers plus another 100,000 electronic-plus-print subscribers, for a total (follow me closely here) of 205,000 people with subscriptions that allow them to see the Times Online site. That seems to be the total since the Times paywalled itself four months ago, for a monthly average of 51,250 subscribers. But the article then goes on to say "The Times Online site was registering about 21 million unique users a month earlier this year but the figure fell by 87% to about 2.7 million last month" 2.7 million is more than fifty times the figure above. So which is it?
Visitors who don't make it past the paywall perhaps?
It doesn't make sense to divide the number of subscribers by the number of months - a subscriber is likely to be a long term customer (I appreciate the number of trial subs will be significant, but...), so x/4 seriously understates the monthly average.
These numbers seem totally PR-ified.
"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.
This is actually an issue in the reporting rather than their figures.
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).
I can't remember the exact wording, but their recent marketing says something like "Join the elite readership", which translated to me as "such a small amount of people are paying we need to put spin on it in a way that makes it sound cool".
For a second I thought you were talking about Reddit.
To be honest, I'd be a lot happier with my subscription if the website actually worked...At work I'm constantly getting 502'd when I try and read it during lunch. It's fine from at home, but it's still very irritating.
I'm curious, what was your motivation for subscribing to the Times instead of getting your news from elsewhere?
And, connection problems aside, are you satisfied enough with the service to continue paying for it?
To me, reading the news is a very important part of my day. I always feel slightly uncomfortable when reading Guardian/Telegraph, almost certainly because the Times aligns with my political spectrum much closer.
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.
I also find that the World News section of the Times is second to none (in terms of depth), and yes, that includes the BBC.
But you have to pay Murdoch to read it.
The Times definitely preaches to the choir.
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.
aligns with my political spectrum much closer.
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 think it's honest of him to say that.
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?
I thought The Times was meant to be slightly right, but their coverage seems more balanced in recent years. It's more an image than an overall agenda, given that their journalists have their own views that sometimes conflict.
Wonder how many of these people subscribed out of curiosity? What I'm most interested in here is the trend that appears after a couple of quarters.
0.25-1% conversion rate (50-200k vs 20M) is not bad, 100-400X in terms of readers compared to the pure ad vs. subscription model that would be more like 500-5000X in terms of revenue per user depending on their CPM, CPA, CPC rates and subscription pricing structure (assuming the range for all these are somewhere between 1-10 pounds). Plus they can fire half of their sales team..