Plan for Sun and News of the World paywall recipe for disaster
If News International is finding it hard going to attract paying subscribers to The Times website then it strikes me that chances of success with a News of the World and Sun paywall are slim to non-existent. Someone needs to take the paywall blinkers off.
Yesterday, the Financial Times reported that The News of the World will follow The Times and The Sunday Times behind a paywall within months.
Rupert Murdoch has paywalls on the brain. He was gifted one with the Wall Street Journal, which was already a success when he bought it. He implemented one at The Times on July 1st and traffic has since plummeted by more than two thirds. Early reports said that The Times website was a ghost town with no one subscribing.
Earlier this week it was reported that The Times had lost 1.2 million UK readers across its daily and Sunday websites falling from 2.79 million unique users to 1.61 million, according data released by ComScore.
That doesn’t sound too bad until you see that the amount of time people are spending on the site. The report said that the figures relating to “dwell time and page impressions on the site suggest the actual number of subscribers is much lower than the 1.6 million recorded by ComScore, with many people accessing the homepage and then moving on”.
So while those arriving at the homepage add to the overall unique user figure it drastically reduces average time spent on site.
The introductory offer of £1 for the first month has now been running for more than six weeks and yesterday Campaign reported that News International had appointed VCCP to handle a social media campaign in a bid to build traffic.
If the report is correct The News of the World will be the first UK tabloid to implement a paywall. I might be wrong, but I’m pretty sure it will only be the second tabloid newspaper of any significance to go down this road other than Newsday outside of New York.
The main problem for News International and News of the World is that its content, its celebrity bread and butter mainstay, is absolutely everywhere.
There are countless celebrity blogs, glossy magazines and rival newspapers ripping each other off faster than you can say cheating premiership footballer.
If The Times with its quality content and columnists is struggling then The News of the World has very little chance of success.
The FT quotes a person close to News International saying that NI will begin charging in October and The Sun will follow soon after. It beggars belief.
The traffic will drop off the planet and rivals will soak it up. The demographic for tabloid newspapers is simply not right for paywalls.
This is not to say that there are not good paid content ideas coming out of News Corporation. Its plan to launch a newspaper for the Apple iPad and other tablet devices is spot on. That’s where the market is going.
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Its one sneaky tactic that might make it work would be to bundle a NOTW/Sun subscription with Sky. Users pay an extra five quid a month on their Sky bill. I bet they would they would pick up many thousands that way. I write this morning about how Loaded’s demise is largely down to the fact that the web offers that content for nothing – http://ashleynorris.posterous.com/did-the-web-kill-off-the-lads-mag I think you are right in that the same can be said for the tabs. Also the number of hardcore NOTW readers online who don’t go to the site via links/search engines etc must be tiny
They could bundle it – but £60 a year is a big ask in these times to access the news of the world website. I would still say no – but then i never visit its tabloid websites. Although on Sunday I will buy a tabloid.
I’m not placing bets either way with paywalls, but I’m having fun watching – I almost want it to work. I’d imagine a vast chunk of audience that subscribe to Sky TV also buy News of the World. As that site is going to focus more on video content, they might just be able to do it. While The Times audience has dropped, I thought it had dropped less than expected? Which makes it a very good start considering they’ve barely marketed the site as a product to buy yet.
@Jack I just added a section on the comscore figures earlier this week – the headline figure of 1.6m doesn’t look too bad, but as you can read the amount of time people spend on the site (the aforementioned dwell time) is thought to be much lower. That’s bad for advertisers.
Great post Gordon – there’s no doubt News International is going to have to earn it’s spurs over the next year or two. I actually agree with both Ashley and Jack, that bundling the papers with Sky would convert people to the principle of paying for the newspapers (albeit in revenue terms, it would not help News International much in the short term).
But there’s another point that we’re all at risk of missing… if newspapers face a future of falling print sales and online ads can’t support the costs of producing a “quality” newspaper, then News International faces no choice in this. No choice. It has to move to a sustainable model, even if that means a paid-for one with the possibility of a smaller readership. And it is the certainty in this that Murdoch has woken up to first among his peers. While he tinkers and hones to get the model right (perhaps putting blogs outside the paywall, for example, Mr Murdoch?), others will leak money or slowly dry up. It’s not a nice thought for the industry, but perhaps, even today, we bet against Murdoch at our peril…
Thanks Peter, maybe bundling is the only way of doing it. As it won’t make it as a standalone title. Print is its point of difference.
Clearly as you say newspapers face a future of falling print sales, but worth point out that the News of the World still sells The News of the World was up 2.2% in its July ABC shifting 2,890,523 copies (down 6.9% year on year).
I love the News of the World as much as anything on Sunday, but the idea of paying to read it online is an anathema — i do occasionally hit a link when reading celeb trash online, but don’t think i ever search for the site or go their directly. I wonder how much of its audience does have the site bookmarked.
I’ve written a few posts on my blog ever since the Times paywall went up and there potentially maybe a growing trend for other newspaper titles to follow suite. however, its the online broadsheet titles that have been at the fore front of pushing the UX, to make their content compelling.
The tabloid’s online offering doesn’t really fit into that mold, and would probably be better off following in the style of online blogs such as Perez Hilton.
I would say that the Guardian online is likely to follow The Time’s lead on paywall, and I think that may be tipping point when audiences will have a two tier online news reporting system: free/breaking news with minimum editorial content (BBC news) and paid editorial content (Times/Guardian).
@TE The Guardian keep saying they will not put up a paywall and for now I believe them.
The Times need to sort out the design of the site as their is too much emphasis on news — they need to be highlighting other content.
Correction for the Above. ComScore don’t measure and can’t measure how many subscribers a site has. They can only tell you how many users have landed on the front page. The likely hood of every single one of these 1.6 million users signing up is 0%.
Its likely to be about 1% meaning about 16,000 people subscribe to the Times paywall.
There you go – just saved you from looking like an idiot again!
@hairyhorse – i wouldn’t be surprised if 16,000 wasn’t far off the mark.
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