Sign of The Times

[ewx]

The Times are going to start charging for access to their online newspaper shortly. (This includes the Sunday Times.) The cost will be £1 for 24 hours or £2 for a week.

[Poll #1569396]

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

I might be skewing your results, since I hardly ever visit their website anyway. (Second-generation ex-pat, so newspapers from my country are probably more relevant.)

[simont]

Mmm. My guess would be that a lot of the "definitely not" people might have benefited from an option to distinguish "I read it for free but wouldn't pay" from "I didn't read it anyway, why would I start paying now?".

[lnr]

I'm of the "I'd read articles people point me to now, but not if I have to pay for them" sort. Addendum: "and probably not if I have to sign up even for free".

[armb.livejournal.com]

Me too. Possibly also "not unless all the other major UK newspapers and the BBC start charging even more than the Times".

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

Inexplicably, the Murdoch family think that the BBC should be forced to charge more than they do.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Seems perfectly explicable to me, just not in the public interest.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I felt the sarcasm was sufficiently obvious not to need explicit marking :)

[(Anonymous)]

There is an argument that it is in the public interest for the BBC to have competition. Otherwise it could become lazy and complacent. That argument is exactly why we have ITV.

Of course, currently the Times is not the BBC's only competition, but with, as I understand it, every other newspaper losing money hand-over-fist -- especially on their online operations -- there may come a point when either the competition will have to be subsidised, or the BBC will have to be more heavily regulated.

And I say that as one of the biggest defenders of the BBC, and the license fee, and the BBC's entitlement to keep the license fee (not happy to see the government plans to steal money from the license fee to fund broadband) that I know.

S.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

We have, what, five private sector news gathering operations at the moment? (And that’s ignoring the tabloids and things like Reuters.) I think there’s still some room for mergers or just plain failures in there.

(ITV’s woes seem to me to have as much to do with their own terrible decisions as anything. I mean, Friends Reunited? Seriously.)

Oh, and with you on broadband funding.

[(Anonymous)]

Merging two loss-making companies doesn't magically transform them into a profitable enterprise, you know.

The issue isn't that the market is too fractured so that no one company has enough share to be viable, it's that the market is dysfunctional because you can't compete with free. Even if there were only one alternative to the BBC, it would still be making a loss if it tried to provide online news at no cost, because you simply can't get enough revenue from online advertising these days to not go bust.

(I'm not considering ITV here because they have negligible online news presence.)

S.

[pne.livejournal.com]

That would be a good distinction, yes.

[oldbloke.livejournal.com]

I was having a big email-folder-tidy-up t'other day and discovered I have a un/pw for TimesOnline. No idea why. Never go there.

[sphyg.livejournal.com]

I might pay for an article if it's of particular interest.

[nomme.livejournal.com]

Got the Guradian ipod/iphone app for a one off payment of a couple of quid.

[fanf]

The way the paywall works, it'll be very hard to find out if an article might be of interest, because there will be no free abstracts, no links from search engines. Nothing but word-of-mouth from subscribers.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

As implemented right now it looks like you get the headline and a quick summary. I imagine there's room for experimentation with how big a summary maximizes revenue.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm curious about the degree and tenor of comment this has generated. If you think it's not good value, don't pay it, that's fair enough; but there seems to be an element of outrage to some of the reactions, along the lines of 'how dare they even consider this, don't they know that news is supposed to be free?'

Entitlement issues much?

S.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Where do you see the outrage?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure. I rarely do read, but I'd be happy to pay something in recompense for browsing even a couple of articles (assuming I actually think they'd be useful -- if I don't then I obviously wouldn't), even though a few years ago I probably wouldn't, being still of a "poor student" mindset.

However, I'm not really fond of the model (although I admit there may not be one which appeals better to my preferences).

[(Anonymous)]

That looks like very mild outrage to me, but maybe I'm misinterpreting 'I'm not really fond of the model'.

S.

[grendelyn.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's outrage, and I don't like the model either, both from a user and a business perspective.

For example, I happily pay about $150 a year for full access to the Wall Street Journal. If I had to pay every time I wanted to look at an article or access a chart, I doubt I'd be bothered to go through the hassle of paying for it. Unless they have some
system of payment that doesn't require you to get out your credit card every time, I don't think people will go for it. Even using paypal, it's still several page views before you get your information.

It's got to be more of an iTunes model, where you can purchase with one click once you activate your account.

[(Anonymous)]

It looks to me like you can set up a subscription account (for £2 per week) that does indeed mean you don't have to get out your credit card every time.

Do you like the model now?

S.

[grendelyn.livejournal.com]

Yes, if one decides to subscribe and can do it on an ongoing basis/by direct debit, then that makes a lot of sense. (I took it at first as a one week subscription, as opposed to a weekly paid subscription.) I also realize that the UK market is much more used to this model than the US would be, so it's partially my own prejudice to prefer a longer subscription time.

It could go either way for the paper. If they get a critical mass of subscribers, then great. I would be very interested to see their market research and how they came up with the one day pass idea. It makes sense logically but I wonder how their page view numbers will go, and how that will effect advertising revenues. Most other papers that charge allow some articles for free or only charge for special services. We'll see what happens.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I'm not really fond of cabbage; that doesn't mean I'm outraged by it, even a tiny bit. I haven't seen anyone here being outraged, they're just saying that they don't regard the Times Online as worth the money/effort.