9 ms·

Times and Sunday Times reveal online reader figures

39 points by Nekojoe 16y ago

MikeTaylor 16y ago
I don't understand the numbers here. They report 105,000 electronic-only subscribers plus another 100,000 electronic-plus-print subscribers, for a total (follow me closely here) of 205,000 people with subscriptions that allow them to see the Times Online site. That seems to be the total since the Times paywalled itself four months ago, for a monthly average of 51,250 subscribers. But the article then goes on to say "The Times Online site was registering about 21 million unique users a month earlier this year but the figure fell by 87% to about 2.7 million last month" 2.7 million is more than fifty times the figure above. So which is it?
- varjag 16y ago
  Visitors who don't make it past the paywall perhaps?
- timthorn 16y ago
  It doesn't make sense to divide the number of subscribers by the number of months - a subscriber is likely to be a long term customer (I appreciate the number of trial subs will be significant, but...), so x/4 seriously understates the monthly average.
ljf 16y ago
Much better than I had thought they might be, was hearing 7000 UUs a week bandied around before. (that said, with enough churn 7000 UUs could make 100,000+ total users since live). that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over. not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.
- zbyszek 16y ago
  This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting to see how the numbers sustain.
  - pierrefar 16y ago
    Yep: £1 for 30 days trial. I think it's very suspicious that such a high number is published in the middle of this campaign. I would rather have them release their figures >1 month after the end of the campaign.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    There's also adverts all over the tube (metro) in London, they're really pushing it.
lordmatty 16y ago
Wonder how many of these people subscribed out of curiosity? What I'm most interested in here is the trend that appears after a couple of quarters.
hitonagashi 16y ago
To be honest, I'd be a lot happier with my subscription if the website actually worked...At work I'm constantly getting 502'd when I try and read it during lunch. It's fine from at home, but it's still very irritating.
- philbo 16y ago
  I'm curious, what was your motivation for subscribing to the Times instead of getting your news from elsewhere? And, connection problems aside, are you satisfied enough with the service to continue paying for it?
  - hitonagashi 16y ago
    To me, reading the news is a very important part of my day. I always feel slightly uncomfortable when reading Guardian/Telegraph, almost certainly because the Times aligns with my political spectrum much closer. The cost is worth the fact that I find the articles much more...enjoyable(I'm not entirely sure that's the best word!). Connection problems aside, I have been satisfied with the service. If I hadn't been a Times reader before, I don't think there's anything there that would persuade me to pay for it, but to me, the cost is worth it.
    - retree 16y ago
      I also find that the World News section of the Times is second to none (in terms of depth), and yes, that includes the BBC.
      - pix30 16y ago
        But you have to pay Murdoch to read it.
    - TheFro 16y ago
      aligns with my political spectrum much closer. So you want to continue to read content from a media outlet that has an agenda from a particular political perspective AND you consider this an important part of your day. I'm sorry but I have to respectfully disagree with your methods of thinking. Doesn't this make you blind to anything else out there?
bali 16y ago
0.25-1% conversion rate (50-200k vs 20M) is not bad, 100-400X in terms of readers compared to the pure ad vs. subscription model that would be more like 500-5000X in terms of revenue per user depending on their CPM, CPA, CPC rates and subscription pricing structure (assuming the range for all these are somewhere between 1-10 pounds). Plus they can fire half of their sales team..
fookyong 16y ago
I'm calling a spade a spade. 100,000 people is pathetic. Note that this is not subscribers - this is "the total amount of people who have paid in one way or another". 50,000 of those are subscribers, which in PR-speak probably means "people who have subscribed" i.e. not the current amount of subscribers. With an in-built audience of over a million in circulation, plus a reach that goes far beyond that, an ad campaign AND the novelty value of "new", getting less than 0.5% of your audience to pay for online (it's not even 0.5% - some [most?] of these people have an online subscription because of their print subscription) means either a piss-poor job is being done converting users, or this business model is a dud.
- varjag 16y ago
  You can call it all you want, but it sure works better for them than giving out freebies.
  - robryan 16y ago
    Do we know this? You would need to see the change in advertising revenue between before this was implemented and now. You also have to factor in the rate of growth in readership to before and after.
    - varjag 16y ago
      I don't know that, but they probably do know themselves. They claim it to be net success, and the only contrary theory out there is they must be rigging numbers. Unless you're Doctorow you'd want some evidence for that.
      - robryan 16y ago
        Well without a way to independently check this kind of thing there is no way to know I guess, it's pretty easy to make the statistics work in your favor to explain later why you could have said something was a success when it wasn't. Great example is SyFy channel show ratings, they put out press releases focusing on certain measures in which certain eps of shows performed favorably even if overall the ratings aren't that good.
pix30 16y ago
These numbers seem totally PR-ified. "The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result." So some of those people who they are counting as having "subscribed" to the paywalled content might not even have an internet connection. What are the total number of print subscribers? Im guessing it's a pretty large proportion of that figure.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  This is actually an issue in the reporting rather than their figures. The statement made it clear that 100,000 is the subscribers who have activated the digital element of their subscription (about 70% of the total possible).
pclark 16y ago
I wonder how many of these users paid for news because they didn't realize they could go elsewhere? My Dad rang me a few years ago and was like "hey, just bought iTunes, do they email me a download link?" and I was confused - what did he mean bought? It's free from Apple. Turns out he google'd "iTunes download" and clicked the first result (an adword) and paid £25 for iTunes. I later actually met a guy that ran this scam, he said he made thousands each month. (Apple/Google has cracked down on this recently) My point is, if you have thetimes.co.uk as your homepage, and you trust that for news - if one day you're asked to pay £1/month or whatever, would non internet savvy users just pay it? I expect quite a few would.
- corin_ 16y ago
  I think it's less likely. My grandmother wouldn't have heard of iTunes, or know what an "mp3" is, so if she learned about it she wouldn't realise it was just one of multiple options. However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.
andymitchell 16y ago
It's notable that they expect to "lose 90%" of those subscribers when they end the current "£1 for a month" introductory offer, which is being pushed by a huge celebrity-endorsed advertising campaign on the London underground. So the actual figure is nearer 10,000 subscribers. What IS interesting though is the potential to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company). The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.
- access_denied 16y ago
  > The Web, with near-zero distribution costs The problem are the production costs of quality news reporting.
- rwmj 16y ago
  But don't you think this niche is already filled by bloggers, who are (mostly) working for nothing. Edit: My blog gets 500-1000 unique readers per day, roughly one post per day, which is now around 0.5% - 1% of the readership of a major newspaper's website.
  - andymitchell 16y ago
    I'm not convinced most bloggers start blogging with the assumption they'll do it for nothing :) They think fame and riches! Or at least having the intellectual satisfaction of bestowing upon the world their opinion... but without revenue they cannot reach out to an audience, they cannot fund deep investigations, they cannot travel, and nor can they inspire confidence in whatever readership happens to stumble across them. (The last one probably is solvable with a recommendation/aggregation service for new/independent journalists). It is of course phenomenally hard to get people to pay for anything on the Web, especially news and opinions. But this is where it's worth drawing a comparison with Diaspora's funding: that $200,000 in donations is remarkable yet understandable, because a certain group of people want to support "big ideas" and freedoms... especially those with a political edge (and nothing is so overtly political as the freedom of the press, in Jefferson's words: "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.").
alexyoung 16y ago
I can't remember the exact wording, but their recent marketing says something like "Join the elite readership", which translated to me as "such a small amount of people are paying we need to put spin on it in a way that makes it sound cool".
- varjag 16y ago
  For a second I thought you were talking about Reddit.

39 points by Nekojoe 16y ago

I don't understand the numbers here. They report 105,000 electronic-only subscribers plus another 100,000 electronic-plus-print subscribers, for a total (follow me closely here) of 205,000 people with subscriptions that allow them to see the Times Online site. That seems to be the total since the Times paywalled itself four months ago, for a monthly average of 51,250 subscribers. But the article then goes on to say "The Times Online site was registering about 21 million unique users a month earlier this year but the figure fell by 87% to about 2.7 million last month" 2.7 million is more than fifty times the figure above. So which is it?

varjag 16y ago
Visitors who don't make it past the paywall perhaps?
timthorn 16y ago
It doesn't make sense to divide the number of subscribers by the number of months - a subscriber is likely to be a long term customer (I appreciate the number of trial subs will be significant, but...), so x/4 seriously understates the monthly average.

ljf 16y ago

Much better than I had thought they might be, was hearing 7000 UUs a week bandied around before. (that said, with enough churn 7000 UUs could make 100,000+ total users since live). that said, I wonder how many are repeat users, how many continue to use the site after their trial subscription is over. not sure what the figures were for there advertising revenue before, but would be interesting to see whether they are making any more profit, especially since they are making now spending extra resource on online only content.

zbyszek 16y ago
This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting to see how the numbers sustain.
- pierrefar 16y ago
  Yep: £1 for 30 days trial. I think it's very suspicious that such a high number is published in the middle of this campaign. I would rather have them release their figures >1 month after the end of the campaign.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  There's also adverts all over the tube (metro) in London, they're really pushing it.

lordmatty 16y ago

Wonder how many of these people subscribed out of curiosity? What I'm most interested in here is the trend that appears after a couple of quarters.

hitonagashi 16y ago

To be honest, I'd be a lot happier with my subscription if the website actually worked...At work I'm constantly getting 502'd when I try and read it during lunch. It's fine from at home, but it's still very irritating.

philbo 16y ago
I'm curious, what was your motivation for subscribing to the Times instead of getting your news from elsewhere? And, connection problems aside, are you satisfied enough with the service to continue paying for it?
- hitonagashi 16y ago
  To me, reading the news is a very important part of my day. I always feel slightly uncomfortable when reading Guardian/Telegraph, almost certainly because the Times aligns with my political spectrum much closer. The cost is worth the fact that I find the articles much more...enjoyable(I'm not entirely sure that's the best word!). Connection problems aside, I have been satisfied with the service. If I hadn't been a Times reader before, I don't think there's anything there that would persuade me to pay for it, but to me, the cost is worth it.
  - retree 16y ago
    I also find that the World News section of the Times is second to none (in terms of depth), and yes, that includes the BBC.
    - pix30 16y ago
      But you have to pay Murdoch to read it.
  - TheFro 16y ago
    aligns with my political spectrum much closer. So you want to continue to read content from a media outlet that has an agenda from a particular political perspective AND you consider this an important part of your day. I'm sorry but I have to respectfully disagree with your methods of thinking. Doesn't this make you blind to anything else out there?

bali 16y ago

0.25-1% conversion rate (50-200k vs 20M) is not bad, 100-400X in terms of readers compared to the pure ad vs. subscription model that would be more like 500-5000X in terms of revenue per user depending on their CPM, CPA, CPC rates and subscription pricing structure (assuming the range for all these are somewhere between 1-10 pounds). Plus they can fire half of their sales team..

fookyong 16y ago

I'm calling a spade a spade. 100,000 people is pathetic. Note that this is not subscribers - this is "the total amount of people who have paid in one way or another". 50,000 of those are subscribers, which in PR-speak probably means "people who have subscribed" i.e. not the current amount of subscribers. With an in-built audience of over a million in circulation, plus a reach that goes far beyond that, an ad campaign AND the novelty value of "new", getting less than 0.5% of your audience to pay for online (it's not even 0.5% - some [most?] of these people have an online subscription because of their print subscription) means either a piss-poor job is being done converting users, or this business model is a dud.

varjag 16y ago
You can call it all you want, but it sure works better for them than giving out freebies.
- robryan 16y ago
  Do we know this? You would need to see the change in advertising revenue between before this was implemented and now. You also have to factor in the rate of growth in readership to before and after.
  - varjag 16y ago
    I don't know that, but they probably do know themselves. They claim it to be net success, and the only contrary theory out there is they must be rigging numbers. Unless you're Doctorow you'd want some evidence for that.
    - robryan 16y ago
      Well without a way to independently check this kind of thing there is no way to know I guess, it's pretty easy to make the statistics work in your favor to explain later why you could have said something was a success when it wasn't. Great example is SyFy channel show ratings, they put out press releases focusing on certain measures in which certain eps of shows performed favorably even if overall the ratings aren't that good.

pix30 16y ago

These numbers seem totally PR-ified. "The figures include subscribers to the print version of the papers who receive an online subscription as a result." So some of those people who they are counting as having "subscribed" to the paywalled content might not even have an internet connection. What are the total number of print subscribers? Im guessing it's a pretty large proportion of that figure.

Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
This is actually an issue in the reporting rather than their figures. The statement made it clear that 100,000 is the subscribers who have activated the digital element of their subscription (about 70% of the total possible).

pclark 16y ago

I wonder how many of these users paid for news because they didn't realize they could go elsewhere? My Dad rang me a few years ago and was like "hey, just bought iTunes, do they email me a download link?" and I was confused - what did he mean bought? It's free from Apple. Turns out he google'd "iTunes download" and clicked the first result (an adword) and paid £25 for iTunes. I later actually met a guy that ran this scam, he said he made thousands each month. (Apple/Google has cracked down on this recently) My point is, if you have thetimes.co.uk as your homepage, and you trust that for news - if one day you're asked to pay £1/month or whatever, would non internet savvy users just pay it? I expect quite a few would.

corin_ 16y ago
I think it's less likely. My grandmother wouldn't have heard of iTunes, or know what an "mp3" is, so if she learned about it she wouldn't realise it was just one of multiple options. However she does know that there's more than one national paper in the UK.

andymitchell 16y ago

It's notable that they expect to "lose 90%" of those subscribers when they end the current "£1 for a month" introductory offer, which is being pushed by a huge celebrity-endorsed advertising campaign on the London underground. So the actual figure is nearer 10,000 subscribers. What IS interesting though is the potential to walk away from the advertising model to achieve less biased news. It's Murdoch, so it won't happen, but it would be a fascinating experiment. Shamelessly borrowing from Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model), mass media can never truly hold discussion & debate beyond the framework laid down by the interests of business. Whether journalists recognize it or not, there will always be limits on what they can say. Because to publish truly controversial material would be to terminate your public voice (i.e. no advertising, no revenue, no company). The Web, with near-zero distribution costs, is the first time in history that it has become economical viable to escape advertising, by only needing to charge people a modest amount: the principle cost is investigative journalism, and there is a very helpful correlation between "well-connected Web user" and people who believe it is important to support an independent media outlet.

access_denied 16y ago
> The Web, with near-zero distribution costs The problem are the production costs of quality news reporting.
rwmj 16y ago
But don't you think this niche is already filled by bloggers, who are (mostly) working for nothing. Edit: My blog gets 500-1000 unique readers per day, roughly one post per day, which is now around 0.5% - 1% of the readership of a major newspaper's website.
- andymitchell 16y ago
  I'm not convinced most bloggers start blogging with the assumption they'll do it for nothing :) They think fame and riches! Or at least having the intellectual satisfaction of bestowing upon the world their opinion... but without revenue they cannot reach out to an audience, they cannot fund deep investigations, they cannot travel, and nor can they inspire confidence in whatever readership happens to stumble across them. (The last one probably is solvable with a recommendation/aggregation service for new/independent journalists). It is of course phenomenally hard to get people to pay for anything on the Web, especially news and opinions. But this is where it's worth drawing a comparison with Diaspora's funding: that $200,000 in donations is remarkable yet understandable, because a certain group of people want to support "big ideas" and freedoms... especially those with a political edge (and nothing is so overtly political as the freedom of the press, in Jefferson's words: "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.").

alexyoung 16y ago

I can't remember the exact wording, but their recent marketing says something like "Join the elite readership", which translated to me as "such a small amount of people are paying we need to put spin on it in a way that makes it sound cool".

varjag 16y ago
For a second I thought you were talking about Reddit.