At face value, the figures released by News International this week showing that The Times and Sunday Times had registered some 105,000 customer sales since its paywall was erected in July sounded like good news. As analysts attempted to decipher the company’s ‘fuzzy numbers‘, doubts began to creep in.
Understanding those paywall figures
The reality appears to be that roughly 50,000 individual users have subscribed to gain access to the newspapers’ content, whether online or through the iPad app or the Kindle edition. The other c.50,000 customer sales are for single-use or pay-as-you-go access to the website, and will include mutliple sales to single customers.
Many of these subscribing readers will have signed-up on special introductory offers, so we do not know yet how many will be retained as loyal readers and how many will ‘churn’ once the full fees kick in. For example, will News International retain all iPad subscribers once the £9.99 a month fee kicks in, given the Telegraph’s iPad app (launched since The Times paywall went up) is free?
If you want to see attempts to break down the News International figures in detail — including some sketched-out revenue forecasts — try Dan Sabbagh in MediaGuardian and Robert Andrews at paidContent:UK.
Has the paywall failed?
For the moment, the conclusion appears to be that News International’s paywall experiment is something of a revenue failure. Though the sites are generating income, the sunk costs in erecting the paywall, re-designing the sites, delivering enhanced content, and marketing the product will have been considerable; so, too, is the lost advertising revenue, estimated at between £10-20m a year, as a result of the slump in readership.
But, then, Sky almost bankrupted the Murdoch empire when it was launched in 1990, while today it delivers healthy nine-figure annual net profits — so anyone writing off his latest entrepreneurial venture to ‘make news pay’ is betting against a proven market winner (whatever you may think of his views or products).
It’s striking that Murdoch took the decision to move the News of the World’s website behind a paywall only two weeks ago, by which time he must have had chance to weigh up the pros and cons of the paywall’s effect on The Times and Sunday Times.https://www.libdemvoice.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=21904
The Murdoch strategy is an interesting one, going against perceived market wisdom that web-users will only be willing to part with their cash for niche products, and that news just isn’t niche enough to turn a profit. But he is at least in a position to experiment, his control of multiple media organisations enabling him the luxury of testing different strategies. Ultimately, if the experiment fails — and I think it will: see here for why — the paywall will be deconstructed, and some form of ‘freemium’ (or metered access) model adopted.
Will ‘i’ save the Indy?
The Independent, though now in the secure hands of a solvent owner in the form of Russian billionaire Alexander Lebedev, has chosen, potentially, an even more counter-intuitive and risky route: to launch a new print newspaper. ‘i’ is a stripped-down version of the Indy, selling at a cheap-and-cheerful 20p, and marketed to the young, busy, on-the-move smart reader, who wants to stay in touch.
I bought the first issue out of curiosity, and ‘curiosity’ is still the word which seems to sum up this move. The problem with ‘i’ is that it falls between two stools… if the Independent Group wants me to queue up in a newsagent and part with cash — even if it is less than a trip to the station toilet — I’m less forgiving of the product. ‘i’ is, it’s true, better than its freebie rival Metro, but not by much, and not by enough to justify me wanting to have the hassle of buying it. The Independent itself is often a thin product compared with its main rival on the liberal/left, The Guardian: paring it down still further, no matter how funky the design, scarcely helps to make ‘i’ a must-buy.
What seems even more curious is that The Independent continues to have one of the least effective newspaper websites. If the future of news, and of newspapers, is going to become increasingly reliable on their digital products, launching a new bit of dead-tree press seems a curious investment compared with focusing on your online presence, or creating a tablet app which genuinely would be useful for commuters, and others with busy lives who find logging on more convenient than a trip to the newsagent.
The future’s… uncertain
I find it encouraging that two newspaper groups are going to such effort to work out how they can afford to continue to invest in their products, how they can capture a viable market for news. I may not like Murdoch or what he stands for, still less the populist strands of his news outlets (and Sky News on a bad day can be every bit as bad as the Mail or Sun). But I believe in market plurality, and that competition tends to ratchet up the performance of all participants: BBC News is, for instance, less complacent simply because Sky News exists.
Informed citizens — indeed democracy itself — depends on a multiplicity of news sources. Many enough are doomed to failure as it is, so let’s give a cheer to those that try and make it work.
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8 Comments
Regardless of what anyone thinks of his products, Rupert Murdoch has been a very brave and successful businessman. He’s taken huge risks, played the long-game and it’s paid-off. Regularly vilified by liberal-minded thinkers, he is, nevertheless, a hero of free market capitalism. Liberalise an economy and this is what you get!
@RichardSM
‘Regularly vilified by liberal-minded thinkers, he is, nevertheless, a hero of free market capitalism.’
You are joking, right? The reason he is so successful is because he spent huge amounts of money at massive losses in attempts to monopolise right-wing media. There is nothing ‘free market’ about that. He is not the romantic entrepreneur you try to describe him as… he used massive amounts of pre-acquired money in order to buy exclusives at originally a massive loos, no one without a fortune numbering in the billions could have done that so in this regard he is certainly no self-made . In a truly free market he wouldn’t have been able to do what he has done.
@Rob,
“You are joking, right?”
No!
@Rob: He’s certainly not a very good monopolist, since plenty of the right-wing media in Britain are out of his grasp. The Mail and the Telegraph are pretty whopping exceptions!
September 2010 circulation figures (dailies):
The Sun: 2,974,405
The Times: 486,868
Murdoch total: 3,461,273
Daily Mail: 2,144,229
Daily Telegraph: 659,445
Daily Express: 659,650
Non-Murdoch total: 3,463,324
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/table/2010/oct/15/abcs-national-newspapers
(That said, the News of the World and the Sunday Times together have more than half of the market for right-wing Sunday papers, having a circulation of about 4 million compared to the non-Murdoch papers’ of about 3 million. But that’s still far from a monopoly!)
Oh man, where to begin. How about this –
“But I believe in market plurality, and that competition tends to ratchet up the performance of all participants.” – if the ‘participants’ were manufacturing widgets or selling burgers, maybe there’d an element of truth to this. But we’re not discussing widgets or burgers but news, information, the warp and weft of culture and civilisation. The investigation and representation of the news is one of the core institutions of democracy, and when the organs by which it is disseminated are owned by bottom-line corporate interests then those same media outlets will be working FOR them. Murdoch and his Propaganda International are enemies of the truth, plain and simple, and have proved themselves to be repeatedly (recently and most notably with the Fox network in the States). And you say you feel like cheering the man on! – hmm, you might want to reconsider that.
“BBC News is, for instance, less complacent simply because Sky News exists.” – less complacent? Have you watched BBC News recently? Ever since the Gilligan affair led to the defanging and public gelding of the Beeb’s ability to do investigative reporting, BBC News has turned into the Ladybird News Channel, simplified news mush that’s petrified of its own shadow, or of the Daily Mail.
“Informed citizens — indeed democracy itself — depends on a multiplicity of news sources.” – well, yes, but that’s only half the requirement. The other half is that the news sources are able to report the news factually without fear or favour, which goes back to my earlier point – he who pays the piper calls the tune. Not only are all our major news outlets bought and paid for, they have been forced to operate under extreme staffing strictures. Nick Davies book ‘Flat Earth News’ explains the low staff/high workload/bulk up with wire service feed ethos that fills most of the pages of the daily press.
So in short, Murdoch is an anti-democratic purveyor of profit-mongering half-truths and whole delusions. If he lost any control over any British paper, radio or TV station, I would cheer that to the rafters.
“…… So in short, Murdoch is an anti-democratic purveyor of profit-mongering half-truths and whole delusions. If he lost any control over any British paper, radio or TV station, I would cheer that to the rafters.”
I could not of put it better myself, very well said 🙂
At first glance, the i seems like a crazy idea – why would you pay 20p when you can have Metro for free?
But then if 3m people pay 20p for the Sun which, when the pages and pages of adverts are discounted, contains less actual news / features than Metro, then maybe there is an opportunity here.
I’m sure some people buy the Sun (or other red top) purely because it is only 20p, compared to £1 for a “quality” paper.
A person with only 20p to spare for a paper, previously had choices between different shades of (rhymes with grit).
If for the same money they can buy a concise paper that is well written, fair, thoughtful, educational etc. also for 20p then maybe, just maybe some of those 3m Sun readers might switch to something better.
@Dave
Do you mean some of those Sun readers who never admit to reading the paper for anything other than the sports pages or crossword? I’m afraid there’s not enough sex and scandal and rather too much reality in the ‘ i ‘ for most of them. Maybe, just maybe, a small number of them will be tempted to switch by the price alone …..those who probably can’t read, anyway.