100,000 people is pathetic.
Note that this is not subscribers - this is "the total amount of people who have paid in one way or another". 50,000 of those are subscribers, which in PR-speak probably means "people who have subscribed" i.e. not the current amount of subscribers.
With an in-built audience of over a million in circulation, plus a reach that goes far beyond that, an ad campaign AND the novelty value of "new", getting less than 0.5% of your audience to pay for online (it's not even 0.5% - some [most?] of these people have an online subscription because of their print subscription) means either a piss-poor job is being done converting users, or this business model is a dud.
The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.
It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.
Part of the reason for the difference is that The Guardian on-line audience is larger and generally more engaged than that of The Times. Part of this is because The Guardian have been very forward thinking by newspaper standards in their use of the web, but it's also because they have a younger more technology aware audience than The Times which tends to be older. There are ways of addressing this (for instance The Daily Mail on-line is a very different beast to it's paper version with a very different audience - one all pictures of pretty ladies in short skirts, the other righteous indignation at such moral outrages as pretty ladies in short skirts) but it's core following was always going to be harder to convert.
Also remember that subscription doesn't mean zero ad revenue. The Financial Times gets just under £30m a year from advertising on-line despite being a subscription only service. Part of that is down to the fact that they appeal to a very specific, target-able demographic but that would also be true of The Times to a lesser degree.
All of this doesn't make what The Times has done right or wrong, I'm just saying it's not as cut and dried as Rory Cellan-Jones implies. It's early days for The Times and I wouldn't write it off quite yet.
P.S. The iPad app is still a subscription as are the Kindle downloads. They're all revenue for the electronic content so I think it's fair to count it.
You have no idea how much it costs to get certain types of "news". Try getting streaming broadcasts for 99% of the conferences that are not computing related. It's nigh near impossible and it costs much.
I've seen this before even when subscriptions for a news site was actually very good but potential advertising from page views would be better. (TimesSelect/The New York Times)
My Dad rang me a few years ago and was like "hey, just bought iTunes, do they email me a download link?" and I was confused - what did he mean bought? It's free from Apple.
Turns out he google'd "iTunes download" and clicked the first result (an adword) and paid £25 for iTunes. I later actually met a guy that ran this scam, he said he made thousands each month. (Apple/Google has cracked down on this recently)
My point is, if you have thetimes.co.uk as your homepage, and you trust that for news - if one day you're asked to pay £1/month or whatever, would non internet savvy users just pay it? I expect quite a few would.
However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.
that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over.
not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.
What IS interesting though is the potential to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company).
The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.
Edit: My blog gets 500-1000 unique readers per day, roughly one post per day, which is now around 0.5% - 1% of the readership of a major newspaper's website.
They think fame and riches! Or at least having the intellectual satisfaction of bestowing upon the world their opinion... but without revenue they cannot reach out to an audience, they cannot fund deep investigations, they cannot travel, and nor can they inspire confidence in whatever readership happens to stumble across them.
(The last one probably is solvable with a recommendation/aggregation service for new/independent journalists).
It is of course phenomenally hard to get people to pay for anything on the Web, especially news and opinions. But this is where it's worth drawing a comparison with Diaspora's funding: that $200,000 in donations is remarkable yet understandable, because a certain group of people want to support "big ideas" and freedoms... especially those with a political edge (and nothing is so overtly political as the freedom of the press, in Jefferson's words: "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.").
"The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result."
So some of those people who they are counting as having "subscribed" to the paywalled content might not even have an internet connection.
What are the total number of print subscribers? Im guessing it's a pretty large proportion of that figure.
The statement made it clear that 100,000 is the subscribers who have activated the digital element of their subscription (about 70% of the total possible).
And, connection problems aside, are you satisfied enough with the service to continue paying for it?
The cost is worth the fact that I find the articles much more...enjoyable(I'm not entirely sure that's the best word!).
Connection problems aside, I have been satisfied with the service. If I hadn't been a Times reader before, I don't think there's anything there that would persuade me to pay for it, but to me, the cost is worth it.
