There have been several attempts to work out how many people are paying to access the Times website now its gone behind a paywall. My estimate is: 46,154 a day. This is based on the number of comments on stories compared to other news sites.
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I was invited to a preview of the Times / Sunday Times paywall tonight, which revealed some interesting things they’re planning.
It also threw up a number of questions – which no doubt they’ll be mulling over before the new site goes live. The most difficult one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?
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Johnston Press is dropping the paywall on its local papers, with the number of subscribers said to be in single figures. People have already started to draw conclusions from this.
However, my view is that the Johnston Press experiment tells us precisely nothing about anything. The reason? Johnston Press had implemented its paywall in the worst way possible. All you can learn from this is that a paywall that makes no attempt to sell the content won’t sell any subscriptions.
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If Murdoch wants to put the Sunday Times or the Sun behind a paywall but still wanted Google to index his content, he would have to join first-click free.
If he decides the Sun is really the Wapping News Journal and joins Google Scholar, then the rules would be different. He could have his content indexed without having to let anyone see it unless they paid a subscription. On top of which, Google would give his content priority if was the original source of a story.
Read the full post ...This roundup of what some paywalls look like when you hit them illustrates that publishers – and Johnston Press in particular – need to massively improve the way they promote the benefits of subscribing …
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