As The Australian moves to a paywall, it has become very clear that it is no panacea. Despite claims The Times now has 110,000 paying customers, News International has confirmed that around 120 journalists jobs would go from the paper — a cut of around 14-15%. Reports from London say that News blames rising newsprint costs and falling advertising and circulation revenues for the cuts.
The Times circulation has fallen sharply over the past year (by nearly 12%) from an average of 501,000 in the six months from March to September 2010 to 442,000 in the same period this year. The paywall has grown from around 70,000 to 110,000. But that has not been enough to offset the impact of falling sales and ad revenues, rising sales costs and newsprint. By way of comparison, the Financial Times said in its report on The Times job losses: “In the same period, the global circulation of the Financial Times has fallen by 9.6%t, but it has seen stronger growth in annual subscriptions to the FT.com website, with 248,000 people paying at least £208 a year — a 31% annual increase.”
In the US, The New York Times, Murdoch’s bitter rival, had some good news for a change in its September quarterly report. The company said that it had added more than 40,000 new digital subscribers since June, with 324,000 readers in total now paying for online access to the newspaper. (A similar paid model started on Wednesday for its Boston Globe paper.) The NYT has 1.2 million digital users overall, including 800,000 print subscribers who get free access to the website and 100,000 who get complimentary access as part of a sponsorship deal with Ford.
The company revealed a third-quarter profit of $US15.7 million for the three months to September, up sharply from the $4.3 million loss in the same period last year. The New York Times introduced its partial paywall in March, with monthly subscriptions charged at between $US15 and $US35. The paper said digital advertising revenue at the company’s New York Times Media Group, which publishes the paper, rose 6.2% to $US 50.3 million in the quarter, against a sharp 10.4% drop in advertising revenue overall.
Paying (?+@##%#) for content from The Australian, ha-ha-ha, very funny. You can ringfence your newspaper, or you can open it right up to the world, like the Guardian. I pray the latter model (which exposed UK’s troika of the government, News Ltd, and the Met) wins, though I’m not saying it’s making a motza either.
Well said Stephen. I would never pay for the Australian, I avoid buying the paper version for the same reasons. Why would I want to pay for their propaganda stream of disinformation and nut job commentators who seem to be stuck in some bizzare Starlinist world.
I’m not against paying for internet access. I subscribed to Crikey not so much to increase my access but to fund alternative media in this country that is structured rather than just volunteer.
We all pay to read news on the Internet, even if we don’t subscribe to any web journals. It’s just that our ISP gets the money. You would think that the news providers could work out a way to get a share of that money without double-charging people.
If a 14 year old kid in Belarus can work out how send me spam that’s not even addressed to me, then maybe even the boofhead who makes TV commercials run on the Herald website when I want to read some news (hint- Internet Explorer > Manage add-ons >Shockwave Flash Object >Disable) might have an idea.
The paywall is th beginning of the end of NewsCorp.
Making people pay for news content is fair enough so good luck to ’em. But their pricing model shows that they expect people are going to read their paper on the internet in the same way someone would read the printed version. For a bloke like me that scans the headlines and may open two or three articles per day it’s just not value for money. If it were a dollar per week with a maximum of 15 articles for that dollar then I might have thought twice about subscribing. I’ve deleted The Australian from my favourites and it’s easier and cheaper to just pretend it never existed in the first place.