Times Online to start charging users
By Wilson • Mar 31st, 2010 • Category: Industry News
- Photo: Apple
Rupert Murdoch’s divisive initiative of erecting a pay wall for his newspaper properties has come to bear, with the Times Online set to charge from June 2010 onwards.
A pound per day, two per week
Users will be charged in one of two ways – by either paying £1 for a day’s access or £2 for a week’s access to both sites. Seven day print subscribers will be granted access without additional charge.
Smaller, more lucrative audience
The Newscorp property is losing over £7 million pounds per month, with Rupert Murdoch betting the massive loss in audience from the pay wall will result in a more monetizable audience in those who choose to stay. With the times currently having 20 million unique users a month, its expected a massive percentage of that readership will be lost. But with reports of excess inventory – advertising space that could not be sold for a certain amount of users – a part of the hit will not be felt at all. The rest of the advertising revenue lost may be made up from revenue collected from paying customers.
Free information
- Photo: Amazon
Professional blogs, coupled with advertising supported news sites and the glut of amateur publishing out there has led many to believe information on the Internet should be free. Rupert Murdoch, and various voices in the newspaper industry, most notably the AP, obviously disagree with that sentiment yet are having a hard time bucking the trend.
The mobile devices play
With the Kindle store – and other e-reader platforms – allowing publishing houses to sell applications to access their content and the supposed saviour in the iPad soon to be released, publishing houses are reaching at every avenue possible for additional advertising dollars.
Given that the advertising revenue for UK newspapers fell more than £700 million last year, Rupert Murdoch may feel that a pay wall for Times Online and his other properties is the way to go. Given the success of the Wall Street Journal, at least, his theory that people are prepared to pay for high quality content even online may still be proven true.
If not, Times Online is gifting readers to competing publications.
Tags for this article: Amazon Kindle, e-reader, ipad, Times Online
