It will be a month this week since what has been dubbed the “Great Murdoch Paywall” went up requiring visitors to The Times and The Sunday Times websites to pay for access to their online editions. Though it is too early to rush to conclusions, the start has been pretty disappointing, to put it mildly; and judging from the initial response, it is highly unlikely that other newspapers would be in a hurry to take the plunge.
An analysis by Experian Hitwise, which monitors internet traffic, the number of visits to the two sites has fallen by two-thirds since the introduction of the paywall on July 2. Much of the damage happened in the five weeks leading up to the introduction of the charge when visitors were asked to register their details irrespective of whether or not they intended to sign up eventually. An overwhelming majority — some 58 per cent — refused to register even for a free trial; and of those who did only a handful chose to stay once the free lunch was off the menu. According to a survey by Beehive City, a site run by a former Times media editor Dan Sabbagh, barely 15,000 out of some 150,000 who registered during the free trial signed up after the paywall went up. The Times management, however, has tried to put on a brave face saying that the figures might look alarming but are not as bad as it had feared. Its worst-case scenario anticipated a decline of at least 90 per cent. But you know what? A study by The Guardian , which itself has invested heavily in its website and is watching the Murdoch experiment closely, shows there has indeed been an almost 90 per cent decline in The Times ' online traffic since it made registration compulsory in June.
Meanwhile, despite their attempt to sound blasé' the suits at Wapping are clearly worried: the original charge of £2 for a week's access has been replaced by a 30-day promotional offer of £1. But even this has failed to boost traffic significantly.
Apparently, the Murdoch team was always of the view that, in the long-term, it was better to have a select band of dedicated paying customers than a “mass of passersby” but, as the BBC noted, even then “15,000 looks a little too select.” And there is no guarantee that all the 15,000 would stay when the promotional offer ends. A significant drop in their numbers without a corresponding addition of new subscribers could spell trouble for this brave experiment.
The truth is that it is such an uncharted territory that, for all the speculation, nobody really knows how it will pan out. This is the first time that a mainstream newspaper group is asking readers to cough up money for access to routine online content that is freely available elsewhere. People have shown that they don't mind paying for specialist or exclusive material (many newspapers, including Mr. Murdoch's own Wall Street Journal , already have paywalls around such content) but would they pay for something they can get gratis on another site? The signs are that they will not.
If anything, people would be happy if the Times experiment were to fail. Because its success would encourage other newspapers to follow suit thus ending the era of free online access altogether. Yet, for the same reason that readers would want it to fail Mr. Murdoch's rivals whatever they may say about his move in public (some have attacked it, some have already declared it a failure) privately they must be praying for his gamble to pay off. The current system is simply not working for them.
Although things in Britain are not as bad as they are across the pond where even famous newspapers such as The New York Times are struggling to survive, we're getting there. Faced with declining readership, most newspaper groups have spent millions of pounds on their web editions pinning their hopes on the new media to help them offset their print losses. The success of this strategy hinged on their ability to generate enough advertising revenue. The expectation was that as online traffic rose it would bring in advertising in its wake. But that has not happened leaving them up to their neck with investment that is not going anywhere and struggling to find a viable business model. And that's where outcome of The Times trial becomes interesting for them.
So, where is it all headed? Not very far, according to experts, unless the paid-for sites are so distinctive that people want to pay for them. The Times sites fail that test. I paid £1 for a 30-day trial and immediately regretted it. For, as of now at least, they have nothing to offer that is terribly more exciting than what is available on free sites. As academic and critic John Naughton noted: “Mostly, it looks like any newspaper website. Which leads one to ask: what exactly does Murdoch think he's doing?”
Exactly.
