The bets so far on how Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online in the UK will fare when it starts charging…
— Times editor James Harding reckons on losing “plenty” of users.
— Sunday Times ed John Witherow expects a drop-off of over 90 percent.
— Our own PCUK/Harris poll of news website users suggests only five percent would pay.
Now here’s another stab…
Respected research agency Enders’ analyst Douglas McCabe has surveyed the 20+ U.S. newspaper sites that are currently charging. Presenting to Westminster Media Forum event Thursday, he said: “When you look at the US, roughly one to two percent of your audience, in terms of circulation, are prepared to pay.”
I asked if that can be mapped on to the UK, where applying that kind of proportion to The Times’ approximately 500,000 daily circulation would result in between only 5,000 and 10,000 paying customers each day…
Difficult to say yet, McCabe said, but: “You’re in that land. You’re in the land of two to five percent probably.”
That ratio would give TheTimes.co.uk between 10,000 and 25,000 customers a day – or about £10,000 to £25,000 income every 24 hours, assuming everyone took the £1 daily rate rather than the £2 weekly option or a longer-term bundled print subscription. That’s about a million quid a year.
All of this is conjecture. No-one will know until it happens, and then only News International (it’s stopped publishing ABCe metrics). But Times digital director Gurtej Sandhu last night told paidContent:UK: “We did endless research. We did a lot of research. Is it something we think will generate enough revenue for the future? Absolutely.” He declined to disclose internally projected drop-off, citing commercial confidentiality.
Trinity Mirror (LSE: TNI) digital director Matt Kelly told paidContent:UK: “It’s a valuable experiment for us all. Do I think it’s going to succeed? I think they’re up against it. Why would you choose to go to The Times when there’s so much out there on The Telegraph, why would you choose to go to The Sun when there’s free stuff out there on The Mirror?
“It would be interesting to see how that new, distinctive free-to-air Times would survive in a free-to-air market.”
As News International starts charging, should The Independent bite and drop its cover price? Enders’ McCabe: “I don’t think it would make any financial sense – it would be very difficult to make it work. But it’s a possibility, not least because of the Independent’s (current small) scale.”