Irish Independent New App

All respect to Peter Vandermeersch, publisher at Independent News & Media (INM) and overseer of its new digital strategy: he didn’t resort to tired “price of a coffee” comparisons when explaining the rationale for paywalling stories on its website.

In a recent interview with the Currency, Vandermeersch had only the really good stuff in mind. “Think about it. We’re bakers and we make croissants, and if you come to one door, our print door, you pay for the croissants,” he said. “But if you come to the back door, the digital door, we give them away for free.”

This enticing yet unsustainable bakery deal is over, however. “From now on, also at the back door, we’ll ask the 2½ euro a week for the croissants there.”

From Tuesday, unrestricted access to the Irish Independent and Sunday Independent sites will cost €10 a month. To get its e-paper too, it costs €14 a month.

Vandermeersch tweeted that the company, now owned by Belgian newspaper group Mediahuis, was doing this “because we believe in journalism and real stories are worth paying for”, a statement that should by now be entirely uncontroversial. The news costs money to produce.

Backwards digital revenues

The old INM regime, back when Denis O’Brien was the company’s largest shareholder, was paywall-averse, yet wasn’t exactly harvesting a great digital advertising bonanza from its open-access policy. Indeed, in the period right before Mediahuis swooped on the company, INM’s digital revenues were actually going backwards. Vandermeersch pithily summed up Mediahuis’s first impression of the digital side of the business to the Currency: “There was none.”

On this basis, INM has little to lose from belatedly discovering the logic of a paywall. The outstanding question, of course, is how many visitors to the Talbot Street bakery like the smell of its fresh croissants enough to part with money for them, and how many will simply seek out free pain au chocolat elsewhere.

Thinkingaboutit wrote: »

I'd only read this thrashy celeb rag, purveyor of fake news and third rate windup merchant act, this forth rate Daily Mail, if I was paid for it, maybe as a press officer, so I likely won't read it again, although I didn't really read it too much. I suppose its new Belgian owners want to pay its way, which is fair enough.

dhaughton99 wrote: »

But how else are you going to get all the latest on Amy Huberman?

Gekko wrote: »

Pricing isn’t great.

The Times (not the Irish Times) is €5 a month

They Indo have pitted themselves at the Irish Times level - €12 a month

They seem to be recruiting new journalists so I guess quality will improve but then I don’t understand why they didn’t wait until they’d done that before rolling out the digital subscription

jack presley wrote: »

Where else are you going to get your Kathryn Thomas holiday updates if you don’t pay?

jack presley wrote: »

Where else are you going to get your Kathryn Thomas holiday updates if you don’t pay?

jack presley wrote: »

When you see a headline like this, you know you were right not to subscribe:

"I'm the definition of fun - life after litigation for baroness of Ballsbridge Gayle Killilea".

dohboy wrote: »

Don't seem like bad numbers to me tbh. It's less than a month since it launched.

Muahahaha wrote: »

Yeah they'll survive for now but it doesnt look good long term. Say they are doing 50k sales at 2 euro a day that gives them 2.4million print gross income a month. With a sub of 9.99 a month in order to replace that 2.4m print income they would need to ultimately sell 240,000 subs.

That is a long long way off the 7k subs they have begun with. For sure they can build on that 7k number over time but if I were the CFO you would hoping of getting at least 10% of the readership to pay up. If 40,000 people signed up upon launch at least you've a good starting point to build upon, 7,000 subs is starting from a very, very low base. Its hard to see how they could even get to 40k now dont mind eventually getting to 240,000 to replace the inevitable loss of print income.

Their big problem IMO really is the content just isnt worth paying for. Its not specialised and nor is it in depth and much of it is found for free elsewhere. You never come away from reading the Indo thinking wow Im really glad I read that article like you might from the Guardian or Sunday Times. Its a take it or leave it publication and so far with this paywall strategy many people have chosen to leave it.

dohboy wrote: »

I would call 7k subs a bounce.

Gekko wrote: »

Can you get straight in from the app?

I seem to recall I needed to go through my library website in order to get in to it before