• 105,000 paid-for sales to date in any form (NB journos - NOT subscribers)
• Half of these ARE monthly subscribers (digital sites plus iPad / Kindle edition)
• The rest are single copy or pay as you go.
• 100,000 joint digital/print subs who have activated their accounts (figure for ongoing use not given).

Including the joint digital/print subs (despite not knowing how many are active), that means they've got 150,000 subscribers to their digital products.

Which is actually quite good. It's a shame that the initial numbers were so misreported (the press release, however, was very clear).

This figure looks completely meaningless to me. People "paying to access" include those, like me, who have paid for a 24-hour subscription once.

That does not mean we are subscribers.

If 104,999 have paid for 24-hour access ever, that would mean they had 1 subscriber. If no-one had paid for 24-hour access, they might still have 105,000 app buyers but no website subscribers.

So without a breakdown, there is nothing you can read into these figures.

Times paywall

Any chance of getting one ...? No, I thought not. (Update Apologies for cynicism. I got one!)

Before you agree to give them any money, here are 11 bits of the new Times website that you can see for free, despite its new paywall ...

1 The main category pages

The aim of the paywall is that you can't get past the home page of The Times - click on the any of the categories along the top header (News, Opinion, Business etc), and you're told to log in.

Times top categories

But you can still see what's in the categories by using the back-door listings view. Here are the URLs to check the stories in the following sections: News, Opinion, Business, Money, Sport, Life, Arts.

2 Sub-section pages

OK, not that enthralling so far. But use a URL of the right form, and you can even sneak through the paywall and check out some sub-sections further down. You just change the ending, so here are the URLs for:

• Football: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Football
• Travel: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Travel
• Health: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/?view=list&section=Health

But actually, it gets better than that ... If you were on the home page, and tried to click to the Football section via the top menu like this:

Home page mega dropdown menu

You'd be told to log in.

But, fortunately, you can access some subsection pages via hacking some URLs to include /public/.

So here's the public version of the football page (this is on http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/football/ - but it's the same page as the unreachable http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/):

Times football page

There's also an accessible version of the cricket page and the River Cafe recipe page, even though they're deep beyond the paywall.

3 Free stock market information

Interested in what's going on with the FTSE 100?  See a graph just 15 minutes old, together with info on key movers and sector changes. There are also figures for currencies and commodities and bonds:

Stock market info

Don't like the FTSE 100? You can click the links along the top to see other indices like the Dow Jones or Nikkei225.

4 Guides to countries for doing business

The Business City Guides section has guides to countries if you want to do business there, covering the economy, infrastructure, workforce and business costs - such as Switzerland and Malaysia.

5 Young Photographer of the Year

The 9th Times Young Photographer of the Year is available to anyone, it would seem, including tips for budding photojournalists.

6 Summer with a twist

Summer with a twist: free

Suggestions for things to do this summer (sponsored by Courvoisier). With a twist.

7 Monthly science quiz

It's not very interactive, but here's August's science quiz, for instance.

8 Enter competitions

You can enter the competitions at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/competitions/ - such as the Times travel photo competition.

Times travel photo competition

You can also win tickets to the Barclays Premier League game of your choice.

9 Mapping British Business

OK, this one's on the http://www.mappingbritishbusiness.co.uk/ URL (and sponsored by Lloyds TSB) but it's got the Times header and colour scheme - and the articles themselves are on thetimes.co.uk URLs, such as:

• Interview: Adrian Bowles, chief executive of Helius Energy
• Driving Longbridge along the road to recovery

10 Need to know

The Need to Know page (sponsored by Accenture - there may be a pattern here ...) is available to anyone (as I mentioned in the intro). There's a video and a heat map so you can see which stories are most popular.

Need to know: heat map

11 Search for things for sale

On top of all these, you can also search for:

• Jobs
• Obituaries
• Cars for sale
• Holiday deals

Restricted

To work this out, I looked at how many people commented on two similar stories - one on the Times site (now paywalled) and one on the Guardian site. As you can see below, from screenshots captured at 1.45pm yesterday, the Times had had 4 comments in almost exactly 2 hours. The Guardian, on its similar but slightly later story, had had 117 comments in 90 minutes.

So if we take the number of readers of the Guardian's website - 1.8 million a day according to the most recent ABCes - multiply that by 4/117 (the ratio of comments on each story) and then multiply that by 90/120 (to allow for the fact that the Times story had been online longer) we get:

1,800,000 x (4/117) x (90/120) = 46,154 readers.

Comparing Guardian and Times comment numbers on similar stories

Some assumptions ...

Obviously, there are a bunch of assumptions built into here, so 46,154 has a somewhat spurious level of accuracy.

Propensity to comment

It's probably not true that the same proportion of readers comment on Times stories as Guardian ones. Finding comparable data was hard, however, as the Times seems to have removed the comments from all its old pre-paywall stories, so I couldn't see how many comments Times stories got pre-paywall compared to the Guardian.

Growth of comments over time

The number of comments probably doesn't grow in a linear way over time - but comparing stories after 90 minutes and 2 hours seems close enough.

Comment bait

The stories aren't exactly the same so may not have motivated people to comment in the same proportions.

But you'd be surprised how hard it is to find stories on newspaper sites with the same sort of angle published at the same sort of time and which allow comments. These were the most comparable stories I could find.

And it's not as if other Times stories have loads of comments, as this screenshot of the homepage at 5.10pm yesterday shows - after 3 hours there are only 4 comments about Joe Cole signing for Liverpool and just 6 comments after 3hrs 40 mins about Cameron calling the Lockerbie bomber's release "utterly wrong".

Few comments on other stories

Comparing this figure with other estimates

15,000 paying subscribers

This figure of 46,154 is higher than the 15,000 paying subscribers since the paywall went up that Beehivecity claimed over the weekend - but you'd expect this as existing Times+ subscribers (ie those who joined Times+ before the paywall went up) can also access the site. They will count towards daily unique visitors -  but won't count as extra paying subscribers.

I can't find a figure for Times+ subscribers, but I have this vague memory of about 60,000-odd of those. This story, from October 2009, claims Culture+, a version of TImes+, "has attracted 90,000 active members" (whatever "active members" means).

Either way,  if you subscribe to The Times newspaper 7 days a week, you get free access to the websites. So all this would explain why there are more than 15,000 daily viewers of The Times paywalled sites - because  people are getting it free as part of their other subscription packages.

2/3 drop

The FT, on the other hand, reported at the weekend that:

Visits to The Times’ website have dropped by two-thirds in the weeks since News International, the media group controlled by Rupert Murdoch, began to implement its paywall strategy, according to new data.

However, the decline has been gentler than the 90 per cent fall in traffic some researchers expected.

Now, 1.2 million readers used Times Online a day according to the last ABCes before it pulled out - so if its traffic had dropped by 90% it would be looking at 120,000 a day.

But even this figures sound too high to me, knowing what else we know. And Hitwise's figures seem a bit odd - the last lot in particular failed to distinguish between home page traffic and those that gone any further beyond the paywall.

So what do you think? I wrote once that, if anyone can charge for content, Murdoch can. But maybe even he can't ...

Photo credit

The launch threw up a number of questions - which no doubt they'll be mulling over and working on. The biggest one for me is why users would want to pay for two different websites covering the same subjects?

What's on offer?

The plan is to replace the current site - timesonline.co.uk - with two new sites, one for The Times and one for The Sunday Times.

£2 a week (or £1 for an individual day) buys you access to both sites. There isn't an option to get just one site.

The Times proposition

New homepage for The Times

The Times won't try to be a news wire - it'll be offering fewer stories on its home page than most online newspapers with the aim being to enhance those stories.

Alongside the news / business / sport it will have opinion, arts and life sections.

Without the need to chase search engine traffic or page views for advertisers, the idea of covering fewer stories but in a better way sounds appealing.

Here's an article, for instance, with an information graphic and tabs to let you explore the history and different aspects of the story without leaving the page. This package of content is brilliant - it works much better as an experience than lists of related articles or auto-generated tag pages.

Times article with infographic and tabs

The Sunday Times proposition

New Sunday Times homepage

The Sunday Times site will look very different to the Times's. It will have the sections people know from the paper. So, again there is news, sport and  business - but also culture, style, travel, In Gear and the magazine.

The site won't be updated much during the week - though the aim is still for it to function as a 7-days-a-week site.

But instead of trying to compete with the Times sites for news, it will offer readers the ability to browse and explore Sunday's content over the week, concentrating on galleries, videos and interactive graphics. Here's a gallery - you don't really get a sense of it from the screenshot but there was a lot of interactivity on the Sunday Times site:

Sunday Times gallery

Why two websites?

The decision to replace the current timesonline.co.uk site with two brands and two websites - thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk - has obviously meant some thinking about how they work together.

They seem clear enough that they are two products - a daily news site and a site that you're meant to browse all week.

But it was interesting that the reasons they talked about for this were the different editorial teams, the "different but overlapping audiences", the different values of the newspapers, and the different reasons why people buy the Sunday paper vs the weekday paper.

I get all that for print products that are published on different days.

I'm just not sure why this needs to translate into two different websites that aren't physical products and can be accessed easily on the same day ...

The Tuesday question

Take a Tuesday when I'm reading the online Times Arts section to decide what film or play to watch.

If I want to use the Sunday Times interactive culture tool (which looked great and even lets you remote control your Sky+ box) to explore reviews and book tickets then I need to go to a physically different website and browse to this tool. There's not even going to be a link to it. I don't get why they don't just make the tool available on the Times site as well ...

Or if I'm reading news about the BP oil spill on Tuesday on the Times site. How will I know there is an amazing interactive infographic on the Sunday Times site explaining what has happened so far?

Where there's overlap in subject matters, the content and functionality are split  across two sites. And there's no eaasy way for users to find out what's on the other site without going there and looking - which surely people aren't going to bother to do on a regular basis on the off chance there might be something there?

The Sunday question

The Times site isn't going to get updated much on a Sunday, unless there's breaking news. So it will be interesting to see how it covers Saturday's news when they do get round to writing about it - particularly sport.

Take the Champion's League final last Saturday. In print, the Times would have analysed it in its Monday paper edition, and the Sunday Times would have done a match report.

Online I'm not sure what will happen. It doesn't seem to make sense to split this content across two websites, though. Will the Times site publish a match report online, or will this just be on the Sunday Times site? Having two match reports seems a bit odd. But reading the analysis on the Times without being able to easily get to the Sunday Times match report seems odd too.

Should they let people subscribe to just one site?

I like the different approach they are taking on the two sites. And having them as separate sites might make sense if they were comptitors or if you could subscribe to just one - but you can't.

Given you have to take both, when they have overlapping content, why physically separate it? Why not just have one sport section or one culture section where you can see the differing Times / Sunday Times take on things?

It strikes me that there is either sufficient distinction in the audience for the two brands that you let users subscribe to just one site. Or the audiences cross over so much that you combine the two sites in one and think about what makes most sense from the user's point of view.

Forcing people to subscribe to both sites but keeping them entirely separate, with no cross linking, seems a bit odd.

How will people access the site?

There were, as you can imagine, several questions about how the paywall will work in practice.

Only two pages will be accessible if you're not logged in - the homepage of the The Times site and the homepage of the Sunday Times site. If you click on a link to a story, a box appears telling you to sign up or log in.

Here's the box:

The Times paywall: no further!

And here's what you see if you click to sign up. (As I've said before about paywalls, I think they're going to have to get this to work a LOT harder):

The sign up page needs to work harder

If you clicked on a deep link to a story, you are redirected to the homepage where the box appears (I think this sounds odder than it will be in practice although the page load speeds are a bit slow at the moment. To see it in action, click here (a deep link) and then wait for the overlay to appear ....). If you log in / sign up you are then redirected to the URL you were after.

The same is true of search engines, too - so Google won't be able to access the pages, which won't appear in Google's news or web search - with one small caveat. Google will be able to see URLs that are shown on the homepage but as it sees a login box if it tries to crawl the URL, I'm not 100% clear what happens then.

What are you getting?

There will be a 4 week period after the launch of these two new sites (a launch which was said to be "very imminent" - ie today!) where the current site and the new sites will exist together. Last night I thought they said there wouldn't be a paywall so the new sites will be fully accessible so people could see what the sites were all about. But you can't get past the homepages at the moment.

All three sites will be updated, and you'll be able to browse around the new Times and Sunday Times sites to see what they look like.

After 4 weeks, the paywall goes up and you'll need to pay to access the new sites. At that point, the old site will stop being updated. Confused? We were a bit!

As things stand, this means there will be the paid-for Times Archive, spanning 1785 to 1985. Then the current timesonline site will sit on the internet, not being updated from the end of June but with old stories still accessible. And the two new sites will run behind a paywall for any new content.

Although this seems a bit weird, I don't suppose it matters too much ...

Marketing the sites

What will be interesting to see is how they encourage people to sign up once the paywall is there - how will they show people what they'll be getting if they sign up?

There was no discussion this evening of tours or free trials or anything. I'm sure they've got something planned.

To sum up ...

Overall, they seemed to have some interesting views on what each product is and how it will work.

And I do understand the distinction they were trying to draw between a daily news site on the one hand and a weekly site on the other.

But when the daily news site is actually only 6 days a week, and covers much of the same subject matter as the weekly site ... and when they're offered as part of the same subscription with no option to just get one ... that's when I start to get a bit confused.

Have they projected their internal structure onto the websites they offer customers at the expense of the user experience?

Or do they have a much better grasp of what their audiences want on different days and in different modes?

Only time - and The Timeses - will tell (< sorry).

Here's what I think about the paywall plans.

Times paywall email

The rest of the email says that

Every day we'll hold live debates and discussions at thetimes.co.uk. Covering everything from sports, to fashion, to business and the latest issues in the news, you'll be able to engage with the biggest names and put experts on the spot if you wish.

On the sundaytimes.co.uk you can plan your perfect night out, with our unique interactive culture planner. Book tickets, remotely record TV shows, and stay informed with the help of our critics.

These are just two of the many new features you'll find on our new websites. Soon you'll be able to do more than just read the news - you can debate it, interrogate it, watch it, shape it and be part of it 24 hours a day.

Interesting

• "The conclusion is clear - charging for local news online is something of a no-go." (Paid Content)
• Rupert Murdoch: "he’s on to a surefire loser." (Bitter wallet).

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.

Why Johnston Press's paywall was rubbish

Here's an example of its former paywall (ie what you saw when you tried to read an article).

Northumberland Gazette paywall

As I've pointed out before in my paywall review, this was rubbish.

It used jargon, describing itself as "premium content", and failed to explain the benefits of subscription. With this particular paper, they described themselves as "the n/a site". As far as I am aware, this bug was never fixed during the whole four month paywall experiment.

How to implement a paywall properly

I won't rehash my paywall review, which had good and bad examples. But let's see what Rupert Murdoch's been doing since I wrote that.

The Times

Here's the current information about the coming paywall for the Times:

Times paywall info

And the Sunday Times:

Sunday Times paywall info

Altogether more engaging and attempting to sell the content - unlike the Johnston Press example.

South Coast Today: a paywall in action

And here's a paywall in operation at another one of Rupert Murdoch's papers, South Coast Today. Here's what you see once you've hit the 10-article limit:

South Coast Today paywall

Then you're taken to some screens which explains more. You can choose to register or pay:

South Coast today: register or subscribe

Not sure of the benefits of subscribing over just registering?

Registration vs subscription compared

Interestingly, you can even get the site and paper bundled in one subscription if you live in the right area (note that a subscription to the paper only or the website only cost the same).

Print and web options

Conclusion

These methods of selling people paid subscriptions to websites may not be perfect (I think the South Coast could do a lot better with the box that tells you that you need to subscribe to read more).

But they make a much better fist of it than Johnston Press has.

I wrote in an email at the time Johnston launched its paywall that:

The danger is that a badly executed paywall puts Johnston Press and others off. They could do it SO much better, which would surely improve conversions. All a bad trial tells you is that bad trials don't work ...

And that's my conclusion today. A paywall that doesn't sell the benefits of subscription won't sell anything. And that's all that Johnston Press's experiment has proved.