News International gets walled in
In July, three up market titles of News International, namely Times of London, Sunday Times and News of the World, were placed behind paywalls, thus denying readers free online content. Visitors need to pay £1 for 24 hour access to the content or £2 to get a week’s entry.
Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive officer of News Corporation, raised a lot of eyebrows by choosing to put up paywalls on his most visited sites. In fact, the move resulted in some of the most loyal supporters of the media baron questioning the effectiveness of this experiment.
Now, the critics have been proven right as News International titles have seen 90% of its readership slip away. Industry leading titles like The Times, The Sunday Times and the News of the World have lost out on hundreds of thousands of readers because of the new paywalls. News International revealed that only
105, 000 online readers are ready to pay for online content from the newspaper.
Commenting on the viability of the paywall, James Murdoch, son of the media tycoon, has stated that,
“The first rule: if you are going to monetize something (online), you probably shouldn’t give it away for free. You cannot start developing pricing models (for online content) until you have a retail price….We are transforming the business of digital journalism at News International.”
Many industry experts attribute the declining profits of News International to the popularity of the application for iPads and other such devices, even though these apps urge users to spend money on online content. The Times iPad app is available for £9.99 a month.
Mr. Murdoch remarked that,
“The problem with the apps is that they are much more directly cannibalistic of the print products than the website. People interact with it much more like they do with the traditional product.”
Despite the poor figures, competitors such as the Daily Telegraph Media Group and New York Times are following in the footsteps of News International with plans to implement paywalls around their site.
