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Is The Times’ Paywall Failing Spectacularly? Or Just Badly?
20 Jul2010
This post was written by Andrew Nattan
About a month ago, The FirstFound Blog brought you news of The Times website relaunching as a paid-for subscriber service. We ended that article with a question:
Will you be willing to pay for online news? If you currently read The Times online, will you stump up or move on?
Now, it looks like we’ve got our answer.
Mixed figures are coming in on how badly the site is performing. The Guardian is reporting that 90% of The Times’ readership has deserted for free-to-read services, whilst the Financial Times is going with a slightly healthier decline of two thirds (stats taken from here).
Whichever number is closer to the truth, one thing is clear. People aren’t embracing paid-for news. And less readers means less advertising revenue. It could well be the case that charging for content could well lose money in the long run.
And that could spell the end of the great paywall experiment.
- In: FirstFound News
- Tags: failure, murdoch, paywall, times
3 Responses to Is The Times’ Paywall Failing Spectacularly? Or Just Badly?
Paying For Content? No Thanks! FirstFound Blog
July 28th, 2010 at 10:29 am
[...] official. British internet users don’t want to pay for extra content. Hot on the heels of The Times’ paywall failure comes research from KPMG. And it doesn’t make for good reading by anyone that wants to charge [...]
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March 25th, 2011 at 1:11 pm
[...] The Times paywall went up in June 2010, it’s estimated that between 60% and 90% of their readership deserted for free-to-read [...]
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July 6th, 2011 at 9:23 am
[...] by Arianna Huffington in 2005 as a counterpoint to more traditional, business-influenced forms of news media. And since then it’s built up a huge following on this side of the [...]