It seems that Times of London is ok with firing over 90% of its customers! This is coming just as the Fitch Ratings Agency announced that Britain would be facing a formidable fiscal challenge that would effect citizens and businesses as UK Prime Minister pledges fiscal consolidation. Management of the Times of London and Rupert Murdoch announced their intention of putting a paywall between readers and the news on their website in June 2010.
In times of financial challenge people need to be informed more than ever. Driven by the need to know they may be willing to pay more for the news. Murdock maintains that a smaller crowd willing to pay is more valuable to him. In a Market Place interview: Assistant Editor Tom Whitwell says the new pay model will be simple — and there will be no way around it. … “If you want to read Times journalism, you pay. If you don’t, you don’t,” said Whitwell.
The assumption that a small crowd willing to pay is more valuable to advertisers needs validation. For the sake of this discussion, I assume the Times has validated that. The reasoning may go something like … “a few paying customers are more willing to purchase from our advertisers”, or “a few paying customers are more likely to click on our online ads”. This definitely is a change from the Journalist’s credo of informing and educating the public to be more important than satisfying advertisers.
“We are assuming there’s going to be an enormous drop-off in raw traffic to the site, because at the moment, we get 20 million-odd unique visitors,” said Whitwell. “We are hoping to develop a much more dedicated readership that’s clearly going to be much, much smaller than that.”
At Clikserv we offer an array of possible solutions that keep news available and encourage people to pay as they go and pay only for what they want to read. Ultimately loyal readers become subscribers – by choice – not by force.
We wonder how many of the Times’ readers will start reading from The Guardian!
