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".
Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
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Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#32It'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 hap…
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#33It'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 hap…
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.").
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#35I'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…
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 int…
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Ti…
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can call it all you want, but it sure works better for them than giving out freebies.
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.
Re: Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures
#39I 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.