

Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures - Nekojoe
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11671984

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fookyong
I'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.

~~~
axod
And who in their right mind would pay £1 for a 'one day pass'? This isn't
porn, it's just news.

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mahmud
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.

~~~
Nekojoe
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>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.

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pclark
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.

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corin_
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.

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ljf
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.

~~~
zbyszek
This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting
to see how the numbers sustain.

~~~
pierrefar
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.

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andymitchell
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.

~~~
rwmj
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.

~~~
andymitchell
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.").

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MikeTaylor
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?

~~~
varjag
Visitors who don't make it past the paywall perhaps?

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pix30
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.

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Tyrannosaurs
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).

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alexyoung
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".

~~~
varjag
For a second I thought you were talking about Reddit.

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hitonagashi
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.

~~~
philbo
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?

~~~
hitonagashi
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.

~~~
TheFro
_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?

~~~
nl
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?

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lordmatty
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.

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bali
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..

