The Times: paywalls, porn and iPads

19. @Dyonas - There might not be your traditional printing and distribution costs, but you still have other costs which need to be covered. Hosting, editorial costs, marketing, central services. Even though content is free online (at the moment), it is certainly not free to publish it. Apparently Murdoch believes that he can make the site more profitable by having a subscription model. Whether he will have ads or will drop them I'm not sure. I'm guessing time will tell whether it's a master stroke or a massive mistake.

18. @backstroker

A doomed one to one replacement model is right. It's telling that the mag companies have reproduced mags. Book companies have reproduced books. These are defensive approaches being touted as some kind of revolution.

The web is treated as delivery channel only, and not central to the reading experience, which seems wrong. I would like to see what an Internet company does with the iPad.

17. I agree with all of that, backstroker.

16. While there's obviously a problem to be solved here, they seem to be approaching it through a one-to-one replacement model. This is doomed because of

i) The difference in perceived value. Although we know that print is financed by advertising, subliminally we purchase an object, and a virtual replacement "has to" be cheaper.

ii) Purchase of a print paper is either impulse on the basis of browsing or curiosity, or a regular purchase. In either case it's out of loose change, not a banking exchange with its overtones of commitment.

iii) Web consumption of news is overwhelmingly on an item-by-item and impulse basis, not by purchase of a complete package containing unwanted material.

iv) Paradoxically, pay-and-forget decisions for internet services are the most accepted model, avoiding as they do the big "value" decision which a daily, weekly or monthly payment requires.

Thus while I might be prepared to pay an annual fee (£20-£30?)for access to a facility, if I had to make that decision, regardless of price, each time I wanted to read something I'd go somewhere else. What's more, with this approach it wouldn't be beyond the wit of man to build such subscription details into links-through from search engines or other sites

15. How much does the paper version cost? At most, if I wanted such a thing, I'd consider paying maybe 66% of the paper based version. There is no cost for printing, paper or any of the normal costs associated with getting it into circulation.

£1 a day looks steep, £2 a week only looks good in comparison to that. I wouldn't be surprised if the daily cost is purposely inflated to make the week cost look a better option. I hate anything that tries to give a false impression of savings that way.

14. The iPad is another channel. It makes it easier to create paywalls. It makes it easier to create packaged editorial (assuming that's a strength online and not a weakness). It makes stuff look nice. But it doesn't make editorial more scarce. Or more up to date. Or more authoritative. Or more flexible. And its content still has to compete with websites.

13. The decision by News International to charge for access to their websites is a really interesting move. Mel****er applauds the innovation of new business models for online content. Everybody benefits from a thriving and successful global publishing sector; any move that can mitigate the financial challenges in the media sector is a positive.

Many publications – such as the Wall Street Journal for example – have already gone down this route and others are considering the same.

The ongoing challenge for publishers, in the aftermath of installing pay walls, will be to ensure their customers are aware of the valuable and compelling content being created by their journalists. This could very easily be content that readers would be more than happy to pay for, but which they might not even know exists. Getting the balance right between the availability of free content and access to paid-for content will be crucial.

As a truly global media monitoring company, Mel****er believes we can play a valuable role in this regard. We are already creating global awareness of restricted content behind login pages and pay walls for numerous media outlets such as the Financial Times. We promote and market their restricted content to a global audience of potential paying readers and thereby drive traffic and revenue for our partnering publishers.

Jorn Lyseggen, CEO of Mel****er (http://mel****er.com/en/who-we-are)

12. Mattswain:

> It needs a selling point. Maybe that will be a lot of video, maybe it will be well-written informed articles, maybe it will be something else altogether.

Yes, definitely. It's interesting to compare newspapers with something like Private Eye, which is in rude health these days. I'm quite sure PE could go online and paywalled, and that it would work: what it does, nobody else really does.

11. On a related note, there's a nice defence of print by Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter over at Adweek.

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/community/columns/other-columns/e3ie9fc421daf51cf825e4a5654e2555692?

"You could argue that the magazine is as brilliant an invention as anything Apple will come up with."

10. I think this will live or die on how it's marketed, how good the content is and cost.

Clearly if all you want are the bare bones facts of the news then you're not going to pay; there's absolutely no need and never will be. There'll always be someone offering free news even if all of the newspapers offer a subscription service.

It has to be marketed correctly; convince people why they should pay; what is it that makes it worth paying for.

It needs a selling point. Maybe that will be a lot of video, maybe it will be well-written informed articles, maybe it will be something else altogether.

Perhaps the time is right because of the technology that is available with devices like the iPad are coming at the perfect time for the newspapers.

I think we'll see a few different charging models while the publishers see what works from the one that the Times is proposing to micro-payments on a story by story basis.

I disagree with the comparisons to iTunes. A lot of people flocked to iTunes for convenience rather wading through a load of dodgy and torrents and some of us also prefer to hold legal copies of albums so our favourite artists get paid. This isn't remotely comparable to paying for news content.

9. Ironic that whilst print is becoming cheaper (Metro), the Times is online-pay. I genuinely hope this fails in order that it doesn't become the norm. I don't think it will, though, because whilst ever there's a BBC providing decent news online for free, most other outlets are secondary.

I've got the Guardian iPhone app, which at £2.39 indefinitely, provides a great service. Paying £1 a day for online content just isn't going to work, it's the wrong cost model.

8. Why on earth are the Times online going to charge £1 a day right from the start. They should be encouraging their online base to stay with them when they go to pay per view. They should charge a lot less for their online content compared to the newspaper, even though it will be the same quality. All the news they provide for £1 a day will be easily found for nothing in plenty other news sites.

Bring small payments into news sites slowly would give them a much better chance of people paying for it, rather than going full price straight away, when you can get the news for nothing in the first place.

7. Convenience is definitely a big part of the equation. It's a right royal PITA to assemble your own printed newspaper, but exceptionally easy to do the same thing with bits in an RSS reader. So you pay someone to make your print newspaper, but you grown your own online and spend your money on the reading hardware instead.

I think the exception is when quality matters, so for example I buy DVDs rather than download films (legally or otherwise) because I want the ease of use, device independence and quality you get from a packaged product. I'm not sure how a newspaper can offer that, or enough of that to overcome the good enough problem where some other outlet's content is good enough to replace yours.

On a related note, I think it's going to be fascinating to see what the Guardian does with its newspaper app. Strategy appears to be get people in now for what's effectively free content and then charge later.

6. @labrowp

You aren't paying for content, you are paying for access to content you could not otherwise get. When you go to see a movie, you are paying to be let into the cinema. In the days before piracy, when you bought a DVD you were paying to be allowed to see the DVD. (Now of course, you don't have to pay if you torrent instead). Do you think you pay for the football? You are paying for Sky to allow you access to the football. And so on.

5. Nicolas is right. People don't use iTunes to get cheap music, they use it for simplicity and peace of mind. If all they cared about was getting cheap music, they'd be using Torrents.

4. I cannot see this working, when there are plenty of free alternatives to Times Online.

3. nicolasmerritt: daftest thing I ever heard. Of course people pay for content. When they buy a book, newspaper, magazine, CD, DVD, blu-ray, go to the cinema, whatever, they are paying for content. I don't read a Stephen King book because of access, scarcity, convenience, I read it for the content. Just like an AC/DC CD, a Star Trek film whatever. People do pay for content.

2. > People don't pay for 'content'. They pay for things like access, scarcity, convenience, hard benefits.

Oh, absolutely. I'm using "content" as shorthand for all of those things. I spend £700/year on (printed) newspapers, and I think most of that is for the form factor and serendipity.

I honestly don't know if I'd pay even £100/year for the same content on an iPad. That's kinda what I meant about the money moving to the hardware firms. I can justify buying an iPad and maybe a 3G plan to go with it in a way I'm not sure I can justify a news site sub unless it was *amazingly* cheap. A decent RSS app could do a reasonable job of replicating for free what I currently pay for in print.

Who knows, though, maybe the new Times sites will be amazingly innovative rather than just chucking print content into a template.

1. People don't pay for 'content'. They pay for things like access, scarcity, convenience, hard benefits. People don't pay for 'music' on iTunes. They pay for simplicity. They pay for peace of mind. And so on. Putting stuff behind a paywall means the benefits you get in return for paying for access have to be very strong. Can someone do an iPad version of a paper that offers sufficiently strong hard benefits? I've not seen much so far that makes me think so.