Irish Times Blinks First

At €16 PM for the decent package, it represents a deep discount on the €49.20 they look for for the print edition p.m. (4 week M-S month 28 days).

Now, it will be interesting to see what follows. Will it work?, Who'll go next and who's, if any, is ready to follow?
What will be the reaction from commercial quarters advertising on the IT website at the moment?

Raspberry Fileds wrote: »

It's true that this initial version of the paywall is very flexible, but I would be very surprised if it's equally so in a year or two's time. Given that it could be circumnavigated by simply searching in Google for an article you see on the website, I think the motivations are two-fold: to pick up easy cash from wealthy readers who have transitioned to online and so as to have a baseline from which to start increasing restrictions.

On first reading I, with a commercial head on, understood that as of Monday all articles, from Monday's edition on, would be behind a paywall.

Any article currently in the wild via search engines or f/book would still be accessible?

Otherwise its a complete joke. If they got, say, 15,000 subscribers and 10% of them posted an article a day, some news, some business, some sport etc - then they would have a serious amount of articles accessible to non-subscribers.

I could see a cabal/ group collusion by subscribers to set up a f/book page where they would post articles which we could all access :eek:

It needs clarification

elperello wrote: »

I wonder where does this leave the regular buyer of the paper edition?

Will they be able to avail of some online access in return for their loyalty in buying the paper 6 days a week?

There is a bundled package of print home delivery and digital for 50 a month. The indo take on it is fairly standard and strikes me they were not aware of the immimant release of the paywall
http://www.independent.ie/business/media/irish-times-to-introduce-paywall-next-week-costing-up-to-50-a-month-30998124.html

Its all very interesting, now that a few numbers have been thrown out there by the two articles flogen posted.

Taking Liam Kavanagh first; he notes that the company gets 12.5% of its revenue from digital and it had 6.1 uniques in January.

Therefore their annualised digital revenue would be in the parish of €10.5 pa currently. Now, that's primarily made up of agency revenue which he can kiss goodbye to (and maybe he's glad to!)

If the article siting The Nieman Foundation stands true for them on the .05% translation to subscription, then the 6.1m uniques will translate into 30,500 subscribers annually. Allow me the unreal world of economic speculation - I'm assuming no churn and it's a simple €16 per month subscription.

That would yield them €27.3m pa in digital subscription revenue!

It's back of a cigarette packet stuff, but it looks ok on those numbers.

flogen wrote: »

The real problem for online services is getting the initial sign-up...

It might seem that way to someone who has never run a subscription service but the real battle is over renewals. The first year always has a novelty effect in that people will be testing the system but the crunch is when the first year subscribers have to renew. The success, or otherwise, of the IT's venture won't be known until the middle of 2016. This is because there's an initial "land rush" of subscriptions as the paywall is introduced followed by a slower rate of subscriptions until it reaches the "normal" rate of new subscriptions. If subscription levels are poor then the IT will be forced to introduce discounted renewal fees to hang on to existing subscribers. The one mistake that the IT may make is a short term or single issue subscription. This probably makes sense to the class of numpty "consultants" that seems to advise companies (without said numpties ever having had any experience in running subscription services) but it is quite lethal for subscriptions as the product moves from being an essential, in the mind of a consumer, to being one that can be bought as needed. If that perception takes hold then it is game-over for the IT's paywall venture.

Regards...jmcc

flogen wrote: »

I'm not sure how applicable that will be in this instance.

It is a constant in all subscription based systems. Remember that most of the people commenting on this have no background in such systems and have never run one. (Much like how many of the IT's supposed specialist journalists are crayon jockeys rather than people with specialist knowledge or backgrounds.) It is a totally different animal to ordinary newspaper sales.

By the looks of things the IT will be charging on a monthly basis and - if it follows any modern digital subscription model, as opposed to the old-fashioned print subscription model - it will be automatically charged until the customer says otherwise.

The trick, for any subscription based service, is to get the subscriber to subscribe for the longest period possible.

Obviously you'll still get plenty of cancellations - and in today's IT piece Kavanagh talks about trying to manage churn - but it's a different animal to having to prompt people to renew on an annual basis.

I suppose that if you go back to the dawn of the IT's previous efforts, you'll see similar articles on their brave new future.

It's apples and oranges to a degree, but I'd reckon there's a decent chunk of Netflix subscribers who hardly touch the service, but don't really notice the €7+ monthly fee coming out of their account regardless.

No. I think that services like Netflix have moved watching TV from being a largely broadcast synchronous model to an asynchronous model where the viewer has much more control over consumption (far beyond video recorders and DVRs). It has moved from a push model (where the broadcaster broadcasts the programming) to a pull model (where the subscriber selects what they want to watch when they want to watch it.).

The TV channels have responded to that with their own hybrid pull model where they make programming available on their digital player services. Now the problem for newspapers is that this is anathema to their model which depends on the entire newspaper (print) being sold for a fixed fee so that the reader effectively pays everything in the edition. With a digital model, the subscriber may only end up reading the articles that they want to read rather than methodically pouring over the newspaper during their coffee break. Thus the danger is that sooner or later, the subscriber cops on to the fact that what's original is not good and what's good is not original. They could get much of the same material for free elsewhere. And when that realisation hits, non-renewal and abandonment rates rocket.

In terms of the initial sign-up - I think that curiosity will be somewhat subdued by the fact that this is a leaky paywall rather than a hard one - it's not like those holding off will miss out on what's going on at IT.com... time and again, though, companies face the struggle of getting customers to part with their CC details in the first place, after which it's much easier to convince them to spend.

It may end up cannibalising its archive service to entice people to subscribe.

Regards...jmcc

Harry Palmr wrote: »

I don't read Irish paper websites, they have never come close to what the Guardian can offer (or the Mail at the other end!) so I don't know if there is anything really worth paying for. Can they do investigative depth on a regular basis which isn't being done (maybe better) elsewhere? Would anyone pay to read the thoughts of a John Waters or Kevin Myers every week? (I have no idea if they still write for the IT).

Neither of them write for the IT. Myers was lost to the Independent in a dreadful mistake by Geraldine Kennedy. Waters ended up in the Indo too. They were two commentators that the IT should not have lost as they brought in readers.

Regards...jmcc

hmmm wrote: »

Still, for the last quality Irish broadsheet I'm happy to pay 12 - if only to try and help it survive.

It is a buyer's market where most of the content is free. That's what the IT is up against. And the most powerful argument for any prospective subscriber is this: It is the IT's job to provide me with information. It is not my job to help the IT survive.

The loyal reader is quickly becoming a thing of the past. The IT has depended on it for the last twenty years or so (since the advent of the internet as a consumer service). Unfortunately it hasn't really advanced much in that twenty years.

Regards...jmcc

hmmm wrote: »

I know, I know, but the reality is that the only way we are going to get quality journalism in the future is if we pay for it. There are lot of nicely packaged, but parasitical, online news sites which lift news from the "quality" newspapers and which do very well out of this, but they add nothing original themselves other than the occasional comment article.

Unfortunately. But the problem with the Irish Times is that there has been a fragmentation of specialisations on the web and this means that people can get better specialist coverage (economic, technology etc) elsewhere. The Irish Times is still pushing the same clueless commentators and churnos as being better than others when they are clearly not. Good journalism is expensive and what the Irish Times did in the last twenty years was to shift to commentary because it was cheaper. And that strategy is really hitting its circulation figures now because it is not sure whether it is a magazine (mainly analysis and commentary) or a newspaper (mainly news coverage with minimal editorials/op-eds). On those figures, the IT will continue to lose readers and may be below 50K (bulks excluded) by the end of the year.

Regards...jmcc

Harry Palmr wrote: »

I don't read Irish paper websites, they have never come close to what the Guardian can offer (or the Mail at the other end!)

Irish news?

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