UK Newspaper Drops Paywall After Less Than 10 People Subscribe
from the disasters dept
As Rupert Murdoch moves forward with his plans to put in place a paywall for the online sites of some of his UK newspapers, he may want to look around carefully. Jeff Sonderman points us to the news of a UK newspaper publisher that put in place a paywall of £5 for three months of access to its newspaper websites late last year -- only to find that the paywall has been quietly dropped after less than ten people signed up at one of the papers:A source at one of the titles involved in the trial said it had been a "disaster" and that the number of people subscribing had been in single figures.This fits with Newsday's experiment, where only 35 non-Cablevision subscribers were willing to sign up. Newspapers keep over-estimating the willingness of people to pay to read websites.
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Filed Under: paywall, united kingdom
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Heh, this is lovely:
It's true too. What a great plan.
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yeah
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One of these days they MIGHT learn...
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Re: One of these days they MIGHT learn...
That's what she said.
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Very small papers
That said i think the Times paywall is going to be a disaster.
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So much for that idea.
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We gotta be paid
Just because you have a product, does not entitle you to guaranteed income, it doesn't matter if that product is food, music, nor news. You have to give the user of your product some reason to select it over the competition, especially if you are going to look at selling.
If you fail to deliver on this reason, expect to fail at selling and profit. This has been the whole message that Techdirt has been trying to put out to the public and the one that is most often ignored because it isn't what those selling want to hear. That *gasp* they may have to work at it instead of just putting it out to tell folks why it's better than the rest of the competition that either costs less or nothing at all.
I don't know about you but I'm willing to pay for quality. I am not willing to pay as much for less value than something else I see as worth more. News is not on a high category with me in the sense that I will pay very much for it when there are tons of sites out there I can pick it up for free at and the majority seem to be of the same quality as the pay-for sites. This comes back to the news rewriting that most news sites do and then think they are entitled to payment because they reworded the news. To me, that didn't add enough value to the quality to make it worth it.
The response to paywalls tells me I'm not alone in this perceived value.
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Sometimes works, sometimes
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Re: We gotta be paid
Ah, well.. they don't care about me, so they don't even know I'm NOT buying what they're shoveling out.
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Rupert needs
I propose increasing the fees isp charge to customers so all papers, music, video and everyone else that takes him to dinner gets a cut.
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Re: Sometimes works, sometimes
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Re:
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Re: Re:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
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Re: yeah
That wont help either, they will just go out and rationalize that this "next" thing (iPad in this case) will save them. Rupert Murdoch and the other media distribution types think that there is a solution when there isnt.
Here is the source of all the problems for media distribution companies ...
Infinite sources of competition, some of which falls across different media types (TV, radio, internet, etc), reduces the available pool of consumers for any given source to something approaching zero. This over time reduces the profitability of these legacy media distributors to a number that approaches zero. While there is no such thing as an infinite number of sources, we are at the point where the number of news sources has reached a level that has partially saturated the news market. This trend will continue into the future so that even free news paper will begin to see a decline.
JMHO
David
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Re:
If they only had 1,000 customers to begin with then they met their goal ... ;)
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Re: Very small papers
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I'm Sorry For The Workers
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Still Doesn’t PROVE It’s A Stupid Idea
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