The Times has vanished behind a pay wall and… frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
There is nothing about The Times that cannot be easily replaced with other on-line sources. Move along, nothing to see (literally).
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‘The Times’ becomes an internet irrelevenceJune 17th, 2010 |
 33 comments to ‘The Times’ becomes an internet irrelevence |
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Couldn’t agree more Perry. The website was (is) a disgrace. It was all over the place. It kept on flagging up “Mary Beard – A don’s life” as if anyone cared and seemed to be always rattling on about religion. The Times missed the web boat compared to, say, the Guardian and now it’s jumped off the jetty.
I notice Mad Murdoch hasn’t done the same with the Sun and News of the Screws though. Still even he isn’t barmy enough to think that someone would actually pay to read stories like “Brazilian almost cost me my nuts” or “Wayne Rooney shagged my sneakers”.
Nope I wont miss it one iota either. Bye Bye Thunderer, hello Careless Whisperer.
Pay walls don’t work because a couple of dollars a month to a couple of sites, in advance, pretty quickly exhausts our web budgets and locks us into only a few sources. We really need a system where we can send, say, twelve cents to any website that’s pleased us twelve cents worth that day, that gives us a running account of what we’ve spent, and after it’s reached some amount charges the balance to our credit card.
PersonfromPorlock makes a good point. There has been discussion for years about the benefits of internet “micropayments”, and about an obvious need for the internet equivalent of pocket change — and yet that business opportunity remains unfilled. A market failure?
My guess is that what happened was this:
Rupert Murdoch noted that the Times is losing him even more money than usual. So he said, as (guess) he always says to underlings who are losing him money, how are you going to stop losing me money? He doesn’t care what the answer is. He just says okay do that. And if it doesn’t work, you’re all fired.
If that’s right, and from the stories I hear about the kind of people (and number of and indolence of and web-hopelessness of the people) who now work at the Times (which confirm everything NickM said above), the next step will be a big clear out. Because the income this generates will surely be a pathetic geriatric piss dribble.
Any actual Murdoch watchers know if that makes sense. I can’t think of any other sane reason for this.
Agreed Perry.
I can think of nothing the Times provides on line that would be worth paying for.
However, whether other people think there is stuff worth paying for is an empirical question – and we shall see.
My bet is that the move will be a commercial failure – on not on the level of (for example) such infamous failures as “Newsday” in the United States (the Long Island newspaper that put up a pay wall – only to find that noone wanted to pay for its stuff).
The Wall Street Journal has “subscribers-only” content (which I presume is what you’re calling a “pay wall”) and seems to be doing just fine with it. The key seems to be to have content actually worth paying for. Also, parts of their site (the opinion section, and maybe others; I’m a subscriber so I root around all over it at will) are free. And I can forward articles to nonsubscribers if I want to. They seem to have figured it out.
Many “content providers” suffer from the psychosis of believing “my stuff is worth X and so everyone who accesses it must pay X”. This leads them down the road of abusing the people who are willing to pay X as well as cutting out people who might be willing to pay X/2 along with the people who wouldn’t be willing to pay anything.
The epiphany needed is that if someone who isn’t willing to pay anything views your content, it’s not a lost sale. There are some, of course who would pay but take advantage of not having to but in many/most cases it’s best to just accept this as the cost of doing business. The simple truth is that most people are honest and will pay a fair price for a fair deal/service. Most people don’t steal because of a lack of opportunity but simply because they have an inbuilt sense of what’s right and wrong. The trick is to monetize this. Micropayments may well be the way despite their failure to gain steam.
Digital content has the added advantage over real-life goods that if someone accesses what you’re providing without paying, the incremental costs are typically trivial. Trust the moral compass and you may be pleasantly surprised.
‘Internet irrelevance’? There is no longer any such thing, it’s ‘irrelevance’, period.
BTW, I am old enough to remember how NYT and WP tried this early on when they just got on the web, and they dropped it so fast, hardly anyone had time to notice it was there in the first place.
Perry, your Smitebot gets wierder and weirder. Please put my previous comment up, eh?
“content worth paying for” – I agree Laird, and that is just what the Times does not have.
I think this will probably fail, but I am not so certain as that as most here seem to be.
Those publications that seem to have made a go of paywalls usually offer specialised content that is difficult to find elsewhere. This isn’t true of the Times.
The old website did have enough of interest that I tried to register to comment there – but it wouldn’t let me. Thus confirming what several people had said about it not being very well constructed BUT might it get better now that it has to?
personfromporlock is quite right (or nearly).
If proper micropayments existed you would browse around the web paying a penny here, a penny there by clicking a button. Your browser will keep track of your favourite sites and you’ll be able to set a limit for each site, or for each day to save the bother of even a click. (at The times pay up to a penny an item, up to 10p a day without making me bother to click etc).
Micropayments would open up enormous money-making opportunities for big firms and for small entrepreneurs.
But here’s the thing: micropayments will only work then they are non-accounted – when they are truly eCash. That’s the way they can be done cheaply enough. Cash works because no one is required to keep a central record of every transaction made. As soon as a central record is required then it becomes expensive (in time and money) : that’s why your local shop can’t acccept a debit card when you buy a mars bar. the transaction costs are too big for the value of the transaction.
But here’s the rub: the reason eCash is not with us is political, becasue a system that supports unaccounted, unrecorded, untracable transfers of tiny amounts, will also support unrecorded, untracable transfers of large amounts. And no government is ever going to countenance that.
So a massive potential for wealth creation that micropayments would engender is denied to us. Libertarians should worry more about this.
Laird, good point about the WSJ. Those guys know what they are doing.
Laird,
The WSJ is a specialist publication. Pay walls work for such things as specialist financial stuff, medical stuff, engineering… Things people in those professions need to know. I know of no one who has got the model to work outside of specialist fields. I also fail to see how the Times can suddenly ramp up it’s quality and actually offer something qualitatively different from say the Telegraph or Guardian. And it has to be quantitatively different. If this is going to work the Times will have to re-invent the online newspaper. On the basis of their previous offerings I don’t see that happening.
“quantitatively different” -> “qualitatively different”
The Thunderer continues it’s transformation into the Whispering Squeaker…they have nothing I cannot find elsewhere.
Interesting observation, bogotol, but I’m not entirely convinced that the transaction costs are high merely because of accounting. Recordkeeping (which is purely data storage, as all these transactions would, by definition, be electronic) is dirt cheap these days, and you wouldn’t necessarily have to keep those records very long, anyway. No, I think the costs of a micropayment processing system would be prohibitive because of the sheer number of tiny transactions involved. It would require a substantial amount of processing power, for which somebody has to pay.
It seems to me that a better model would be for each company (the Times or whoever) to permit people to place small amounts of money on deposit there, which account would be charged a penny or so for each article accessed. It’s a “pay per view” system, rather than an unlimited subscription model. (Perhaps you could have both: the PPV for occasional readers and full subscriptions for regular readers.) I know it seems somewhat inefficient to have to maintain accounts at numerous companies, but frankly I can’t see how the economics of a universal micropayment system can ever be made to work. The barriers to entry are too high.
NickM, that’s not entirely accurate. Yes, the WSJ is a specialist newspaper, but it has a huge amount on “non-specialist” (or at least, non-financial and non-business-related) general content. Indeed, it is working very hard to transform itself into “the” national newspaper (the NY Times has lost its luster, and USA Today is a joke). A lot of people read it who only have a passing interest in the business news.
For me, what sets the WSJ apart is the quality of its writing (both general reporting and editorials) and the depth of its coverage. That requires great editors with a deep commitment to serious news reporting. So far, Murdock doesn’t seem to have touched anything.
price = marginal cost, and the marginal cost of news is zero. Most people are only interested in the basic facts and those can be got by watching TV, or reading a tweet by someone who has been watching TV.
That leaves comment and analysis. Comment is provided free by blogs, and often to a much higher standard and in much greater choice than provided by any newspaper. You can’t therefore charge for comment.
Which leave analysis. I reckon you can charge for analysis, but its got to be good. This though is the sort of thing more often supplies by weekly or less frequent publications, not daily newspapers.
So perhaps a good model would be to give new away free, have a lively comment section (like comment is free at the Guardian) and then cross sell extremely high quality analysis. This could be either by subscription (access to everything, including archives) or a pay-per-read basis, you could easily have a pay up front thing like a PAYG mobile or an oyster card (a PAYG tube ticket, mine gets topped up automatically with £20 when the balance falls below £5).
So you’d have something like
News: England 1-1 USA (Free)
Comment: “England were rubbish!…” (Free)
Analysis: Click here to read Alex Ferguson’s detailed tactical analysis of the game for £1.
“price = marginal cost”
A very common misperception, and completely wrong. True, cost is an element in what you’d like to charge for your product, and helps you decide whether to offer it at all, but at the end of the day it’s totally irrelevant to pricing. “Price” is what the market will pay, neither more nor less. If that’s higher than your cost, you make money; if it’s lower, you lose. And if it’s lower for long enough you go out of business.
Which isn’t to say that your suggested pricing scheme is a bad idea. Offering generic “news” and a commentary forum for free could work as a loss leader, but don’t think that the “cost” is zero. You somehow have to recoup all the fixed costs and capital cost, so your analysis had better be really good to attract sufficient paying customers. But I think it’s possible that even the “news” portion can be qualitatively better than generic news reports and attract customers willing to pay for it (again, see the WSJ for how that can be done).
Here’s another idea for how newspapers could be paid for internet content: a “reseller” model.
A reseller established subscription accounts at a large number of periodicals. These would be special “corporate” accounts which specifically permit reselling the content, so the subscription rate would be fairly high. The reseller, in turn, has retail customers who establish accounts with it. These customers log into the reseller’s central website and there have access to all of the periodicals to which the reseller subscribes. The customer can link to any article which attracts his interest, at a cost of a few pennies each. These retail accounts could be either full subscription (affording unlimited access to all the periodicals), prepaid accounts (with a credit balance which is charged on a per-view basis), or billing accounts (where statements itemizing all articles viewed are sent out monthly). Retail customers would not be permitted to resell the articles. This avoids the whole “micropayment” problem.
Thoughts?
Laird – centrally accounting is not just the cost of the system that makes the record. It’s also all the staff and infrastructure that you need to correct mistakes accept challenges and so on. To give out cards, to do credit checks etc etc. Cash is cash. If I give you a penny the transaction cost is really zero. If I pay you 1p on my debit card a whole banking infrastructure is needed to support that cost.
botogol, the trick would be to accumulate the penny-clicks into, say, ten dollar lumps and bill the micropayer’s credit card whenever that balance was reached. That adds a layer onto what PayPal, for instance, already does but it doesn’t strike me as being a particularly difficult layer.
Interesting that he thinks that he can make money from the digital version when the hard copy has never made money under his ownership. Why doesn’t he sit back and enjoy owning an “icon”, or purchase Liverpool FC?
I got to this site via Guido Fawkes who says he aims to have more readers than the Times. Shouldn’t be difficult.
We have to pay nearly 3 euros for Monday-Friday, more for Saturday and astronomical for Sunday so I made do with their tacky internet copy.
Pay for it? Not bloody likely. The Times’ main appeal is its crossword and you don’t get that.
Umm… what Times paywall? I’m accessing it just fine.
I’m with Perry. I don’t give a damn either. In fact their pretentious promotion motivates me to negative ‘don’t give a damn’. Don’t-give-a-damn- MINUS.
The Times has been boring – Yes, above, “A Don’s Life” which I have never seen any reason to click on. Does anyone know what’s in it?
I go to The Times very occasionally, when bored and looking around, not exactly last choice as The Guardian, which I have never visited, would be the last choice … but the notion of paying to read The Times is silly.
Also, the planning and promotion has been disastrous.
I would NEVER buy a print edition of the Times, so their internet offering, as far as I am concerned, cost them no lost sales at all.
Similarly I will NEVER buy, as DVDs, 99.99% of the films & TV programs (I abhor modern music and it is of less than zero interest to me) I download with a torrent client, so those producers have lost no income from me, as they would never have had any in the first place.
If I cannot find all the news and entertainment I want on the Internet at no cost to me, I will do without it.
the Times is registration only at the moment
i am assuming it will start charging in a few weeks when it has got people used to the system
but the web site does not work properly yet. text overlies other text and the middle of most articles cant be read
need to get that sorted rupert before i even think of paying for the content
As far as Scotlands news is concerned it’s all anti-SNP propaganda from the Times, so I won’t be paying to read that. If they started giving honest reporting that would be another matter, but I don’t hold out any hope.
I will be glad to see the demise of The Times propagandists like Angus McCleod, Lorraine Davidson and Magnus Linklater.
A vaguely ‘right wing’ paper says mean things about a bunch of Scottish lefties? Well I never! Next thing you know, we will start seeing mean things about capitalists in the Guardian!
“price = marginal cost”.
Oh no – not the perfect competition conception again.
The perfect competition conception is a theoretical constuct that is not a representation of the real world (by the way some of the people who thought it up knew that – even if modern “economists” do not).
By the way shoving in something called “normal profit” into the numbers does not alter the above (“normal profit” is an artificial concept).
A businessman (who wishes to prosper) asks a price to maximise his revenue over time. “Price elasticity of demand” comes in here (yes I will use the language sometimes).
This price will vary – both with competition and with changing tastes by consumers.
Price is not really closely connected to costs – other than it better get you more money (hopefully a lot more money) than your costs.
Of course a good businessman is always looking to cut his costs (to find better ways to do things) anyway.
Quick example:
Say to make one “unit” more of “stuff” would cost 100 Pounds (“marginal cost 100 Pounds”).
Does that mean that the price of existing units of stuff will be 100 Pounds?
It need not be.