The Times prepares for June's paywall
Jinfo Blog

25th May 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

In preparation for the introduction of a pay wall to the online editions of The Times and The Sunday Times, News International yesterday launched separate sites for the newspapers, at http://www.TheTimes.co.uk and at http://www.TheSundayTimes.co.uk. Both are free for the next four weeks, presumably to raise awareness and entice readers to stay after the pay wall goes up in a month’s time. (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28452, http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27766 and http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27220 for details of subscription costs and further discussion of the topic). According to paidcontent, (http://digbig.com/5bbqkj), the separate sites were well received by industry commentators. In many ways, it is a case of going back to basics: The Times will be concentrating on news, business and sport, while its sister publication, The Sunday Times is placing more emphasis on features and articles you would find in a magazine. The differentiation between the two is seen as essential in making it clear to potential subscribers what content they are paying for. The big question is: will it work? Apparently, News International executives themselves are expecting more than a 90 per cent drop in readers. Some analysts think the publications will be lucky to convert between two and five per cent of their print circulation into paying online subscribers. According to paidcontent (http://digbig.com/5bbqkk), this would result in between 10,000 and 25,000 customers per day, or roughly £1million a year. Any news searchers who thought they would be able to flaunt the pay wall by searching for Times articles on the web, will be disappointed (http://digbig.com/5bbqkm). News International has taken a rather radical approach to preventing search engines from crawling their newspapers: the new sites will only be showing their homepages to online users. Non-subscribers will not even be able to read abstracts or part of the lead paragraph of articles, such as is possible with most other online subscription news sites, including the Wall Street Journal, which is part of the News International family. Online Times readers will be pared down to the very loyal only. This is all a big gamble and one the other print publishers will be following very keenly. Despite protestations to the contrary, one suspects that some will be wishing that the venture succeeds.

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