In the week the Times launched its new standalone site behind a £1-a-day paywall (still free to trial now), there’s been a lot of debate around how long it will be until the presses stop rolling altogether, and whether a free vs paid-for online model is the way to go.
With the cost of keeping a journalist in Baghdad estimated at £1m a year and £100m needed annually to run a newsroom, the ability of media organisations to create original and valuable content and get people to pay for it when they increasingly expect “stuff for free” is a huge challenge for the industry – and in turn of huge significance for all PR and comms people.
This piece for Wired has some interesting number-crunching by Peter Kirwan based on comments from Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and Sunday Times ed John Witherow. It’s a long read so some highlights and predictions:
- Digital ad revenues at the Guardian are increasing by 100% year on year
- Even so, it could still be 5-10 years before the Guardian is earning enough from digital revenues to pay for its operations
- Unsurprisingly, neither editor expects to ever build new printing presses – quoted in Media Week, both hedge their bets on how long it will be before they stop printing altogether but admit that date is “telescoping” ever closer and certainly less than 20 years.
Meanwhile over at the FT, John Gapper argues both papers need to become “more focused, deeper, with rarer data and information”. This “elite” style of content is how other publications from the Wall Street Journal to the Racing Post and the FT itself have managed to make pay walls work. Another route that both the Times and Guardian are looking at is brand extension: keeping their loyal and most valuable readers close via clubs that give added benefits and content in return for a fee.
The other unfolding aspect of this is of course Google: if the search engine can no longer index Times content, then advocates of the free model would argue this devalues the overall Times brand as it becomes less influential in a global discussion of ideas. Pay wall advocates would counter that they’d lose more influence if they couldn’t afford quality journalism…
Finally, some eye-watering stats: the Times and Sunday Times are reported to be losing £240,000 a day, while the Guardian has just announced £26m-worth of cost-cutting to reduce the £100,000-a-day loss it was making last year.
(Disclosure: my husband works at the Times)
