Earlier quoted context omitted.
>£0 is unreasonable. I doubt they'll get many subscribers at all.
I will subscribe. Especially if I can have it on an iPad when its out.
I'd hate to base my business on people who will buy iPads.
The Times website to start charging £1/day from June
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Re: The Times website to start charging £1/day from June
#22Headline's kind of sensationalist .... it's 1 pound per day or 2 pounds per week which is much more reasonable. It seems kind of high although the real question is if people are willing to pay anything, the right price can be established after they find that out.
>£0 is unreasonable. I doubt they'll get many subscribers at all.
I won't subscribe; I might at, say, something less than 10 US cents per article because I just don't read the Times that much, only from links from other sites.
I'd pay good money to read the Torygraph (Telegraph), which I've enjoyed for something more than a decade (although in all fairness the news coming out of the U.K. as of late is so depressing that's iffy right now, even balanced by Matt).
I'm sure others would be happy to pay for the Guardian; heck, I'm sure some people's life would be incomplete without their daily dose of Page 3 girls in The Sun ^_^.
And if I was in a different phase in my life I'd be subscribing to the Financial Times and The Economist. (In the '80s I subscribed to the latter and The Wall Street Journal).
But I just don't see the Times as offering sufficiently distinct value to prompt me to shell out much money for what they're offering.
Re: The Times website to start charging £1/day from June
#23This is incredibly misjudged. The Times, while an excellent news paper wouldn't be anybody's primary choice as a news source. I suspect that the vast majority of people who are willing to pay for read it would only pay to read it on paper.
It's not like news is hard to come by on the internet. With the cost of switching to another site at effectively 0 there is no barrier to leaving.
Re: The Times website to start charging £1/day from June
#24Economics 101 - people will simply substitute a cheaper equivalent good. For the vast majority of their readers, The Times isn't doing anything unique. I'm sure they will have a small number of readers who are just loyal to the paper, some who are fans of a particular columnist, but for most people it just isn't £104 a year better than the Telegraph or the Independent. I think Murdoch is mistaken to believe that news…
Other ailing newspaper sites must be happy about this. All they need to do is nothing (stay free) and they'll get a massive influx of visitors who are gravitating to the next best free sources. If they're small and lean, that might be all they need to sustain them.
Re: The Times website to start charging £1/day from June
#25This is incredibly misjudged. The Times, while an excellent news paper wouldn't be anybody's primary choice as a news source. I suspect that the vast majority of people who are willing to pay for read it would only pay to read it on paper.
It's not like news is hard to come by on the internet. With the cost of switching to another site at effectively 0 there is no barrier to leaving.
Maybe there are enough people to make a subscription model worth doing, but I doubt that alone will be enough. I think they also need a transaction model for those of us willing to pay that dime or so for an a la carte article recommended by HN.
Of course that assumes a feasible micropayment infrastructure, which nobody on earth seems able to produce. Odd, that.