I'm calling a spade a spade.<p>100,000 people is pathetic.<p>Note that this is not subscribers - this is "the total amount of people who have paid in one way or another". 50,000 of those are subscribers, which in PR-speak probably means "people who have subscribed" i.e. not the current amount of subscribers.<p>With an in-built audience of over a million in circulation, plus a reach that goes far beyond that, an ad campaign AND the novelty value of "new", getting less than 0.5% of your audience to pay for online (it's not even 0.5% - some [most?] of these people have an online subscription because of their print subscription) means either a piss-poor job is being done converting users, or this business model is a dud.
I wonder how many of these users paid for news because they didn't realize they could go elsewhere?<p>My Dad rang me a few years ago and was like "hey, just bought iTunes, do they email me a download link?" and I was confused - what did he mean bought? It's free from Apple.<p>Turns out he google'd "iTunes download" and clicked the first result (an adword) and paid £25 for iTunes. I later actually met a guy that ran this scam, he said he made <i>thousands</i> each month. (Apple/Google has cracked down on this recently)<p>My point is, if you have thetimes.co.uk as your homepage, and you trust that for news - if one day you're asked to pay £1/month or whatever, would non internet savvy users just pay it? I expect quite a few would.
Much better than I had thought they might be, was hearing 7000 UUs a week bandied around before. (that said, with enough churn 7000 UUs could make 100,000+ total users since live).<p>that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over.<p>not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.
It's notable that they expect to "lose 90%" of those subscribers when they end the current "£1 for a month" introductory offer, which is being pushed by a huge celebrity-endorsed advertising campaign on the London underground. So the actual figure is nearer 10,000 subscribers.<p>What IS interesting though is the <i>potential</i> to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model</a>), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company).<p>The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.
I don't understand the numbers here. They report 105,000 electronic-only subscribers plus another 100,000 electronic-plus-print subscribers, for a total (follow me closely here) of 205,000 people with subscriptions that allow them to see the Times Online site. That seems to be the total since the Times paywalled itself four months ago, for a monthly average of 51,250 subscribers. But the article then goes on to say "The Times Online site was registering about 21 million unique users a month earlier this year but the figure fell by 87% to about 2.7 million last month" 2.7 million is more than fifty times the figure above. So which is it?
These numbers seem totally PR-ified.<p>"The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result."<p>So some of those people who they are counting as having "subscribed" to the paywalled content might not even have an internet connection.<p>What are the total number of print subscribers? Im guessing it's a pretty large proportion of that figure.
I can't remember the exact wording, but their recent marketing says something like "Join the elite readership", which translated to me as "such a small amount of people are paying we need to put spin on it in a way that makes it sound cool".
To be honest, I'd be a lot happier with my subscription if the website actually worked...At work I'm constantly getting 502'd when I try and read it during lunch. It's fine from at home, but it's still very irritating.
0.25-1% conversion rate (50-200k vs 20M) is not bad, 100-400X in terms of readers compared to the pure ad vs. subscription model that would be more like 500-5000X in terms of revenue per user depending on their CPM, CPA, CPC rates and subscription pricing structure (assuming the range for all these are somewhere between 1-10 pounds).
Plus they can fire half of their sales team..