Very soon now, the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times will disappear behind a paywall. The cost to access them will be £1 per day or £2 (€2.30) per week.
Most media coverage of this has been negative. It ranges from dismissive remarks about Murdoch 'not getting' the internet to consumers saying they will never pay for news content. Those views may be right. But there is an alternative outcome possible: newspaper websites may get a lot better.
At present, newspaper websites are free. But few of them are compelling propositions. This is not because the news on them is poor (which it isn't). It is because newspapers cannot afford to properly man websites with prominent journalists and editors. Without this extra element, newspaper websites do not offer a more compelling proposition than Twitter, Reddit or Digg, where 'best of' links can be swapped. And although news websites offer news and analysis, they don't offer much by way of videos, interactive features or exclusive content. Increasingly, those are the things that make news websites stand out.
In fairness to The Times, its new website has done a very good job at including these items in its makeup. I registered as a free user a few weeks ago. As such, I now get to look around its new sites for a while before I'm asked to poly up some cash. So far, the results of its website rebuilding are impressive. I've seen lifestyle videos, interactive discussions with expert journalists, photos and stuff that I'd need to spend a while searching for see elsewhere. It's also apparent that there are a lot of people from the paper online at any one moment trying to draw me in to their section.
In other words, they've improved the website dramatically. Whatever one thinks about the strategy of a paywall, this quality improvement can't be undone. And rivals will be looking at it closely. Presuming that one or more of them will follow down the paywall road (expect to see the Telegraph making moves in that direction soon), we could be entering a new era of online news websites.
As for the price, £2 (€2.30) per week for six daily editions and a Sunday edition isn't really extortionate. However, I still think that £1 per week would more than double its subscription base.
And Ireland? Sadly, no Irish website can even think about erecting a paywall unless the march of RTE's website is checked. As a punter, it's great to have RTE's website there. For the rest of the Irish media industry, it's a barrier to entry.
The Times has to compete with a free BBC which is much better than the RTE website.
So the barriers to entry aren't much different.
Why did the Irish Times cut back their paywall?
Were they not one of the first in the world to put up a paywall.
Posted by: denis | May 25, 2010 at 07:22 PM
Don't believe RTE is a barrier to entry, it's a stimulus for differentiation. It requires thinking outside the box, which no Irish media outlet seems capable of doing online. ITimes app is an embarrassment to the information age, their pay wall in current iteration is poor because online offering is still relatively poor. Would happily pay for SBP online if offering was good enough but that would require ground breaking design & content offering
Posted by: Barrys55 | May 25, 2010 at 10:10 PM
Denis,
Disagree. The BBC's web offering is far more limited in its scope and breadth, relative to its market, than RTE is to its market. There are 60 million people in the UK. That leaves a lot of space for web services other than the BBC. Just as it leaves plenty of space for several TV channels. In Ireland, the market is tiny: there is very limited space for any rivals to RTE. Look at TV3 -- would you say that that is a genuine broadcasting rival to RTE?
Barry, I agree that differentiation is needed. And perhaps that does mean 'thinking outside the box', to use the cliche. I agree that Irish websites' offering is hard to classify as ground-breaking. Must disagree with you on RTE not being a barrier to entry, though. It absolutely is.
Posted by: Adrian Weckler | May 25, 2010 at 11:24 PM
Terry McDonell, editor of Sports Illustrated, did a demo of the magazine's HTML5 prototype at Google I/O recently. Check out the first video: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/19/sports-illustrated-html5/
This is the kind of rich interactive accessible content people will pay for online.
Posted by: Jim Daly | May 26, 2010 at 06:21 AM
I would have thought that the IT having everything free is the barrier, I think their website is actually quite good, the articles are much better and they are quicker too with breaking news. RTEs site feels like an afterthought, whereas the IT seem to take it seriously
Posted by: Conor Sullivan | June 07, 2010 at 12:49 PM