media seo analytics | push2digital - Filed under 'paywall'

March 18, 2011

NY Times Leaves 5 Holes in Paywall

Just received an e-mail from New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger [yes, we go way back … all the way to the time I registered for his site] detailing the specifics of nytimes.com’s paywall strategy. What’s interesting to note is that this a toe-in-the-water approach to paid subscriptions because there are no less than five ways to read content without paying.

Granted if you read The Times from cover to cover, you will be forced to subscribe to the print or digital edition, but a wealth of content will still be available to the general public and through search with a fairly generous viewing limit.

Filed under // Arthur Sulzberger media nytimes.com paywall seo

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [0]

September 3, 2010

News Corp's Paywall Plan -- A Successful Disaster

It's been two months since News Corp dropped the paywall on Times Online visitors and reportedly lost 90 percent of its readers. But the early results are in and The Independent says it's ... a murky bag of critics' "I-told-you-sos" mixed with advocates cheering paywall progress.

Adrian Drury, a media analyst, says. "Fundamentally, at a brand-value level, you are killing the idea of times.co.uk as a channel choice for news online. That is something that is very difficult to recover" ... "The most disappointing thing for me is that there doesn't seem to have been any strategy to create unique, compelling content that would differentiate the online product," says Paul Bradshaw, a specialist in new media journalism. "I think it's 'business as usual' – which probably betrays that this is really about protecting the print product rather than establishing a genuine business around online content."

That said ...

The News of the World website is set to introduce charging next month. This is seen as a "statement of intent" by industry observers, and an indication that the other paywalls have not been disastrous.

"This is not a numbers game," says Greg Hadfield, former head of digital development at Telegraph Media Group and now an executive at the media agency CogApp. "The Times and The Sunday Times have a near-unique opportunity to build a one-to-one communication with someone about whom they know their name, email and credit card number." ... Bradshaw too believes that "the strategy is more about gathering consumer information than selling content."

via independent.co.uk

Filed under // media news corp paywall seo strategy times online

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [0]

May 26, 2010

News Corp: Not Even a Smidge for Search Engines

The Times and Sunday Times’ upcoming paid sites will not allow their articles to appear in search engines like Google. That was one nugget gleaned during a preview of the attractive forthcoming relaunches Monday night. Times Online will relaunch as separate entities “imminently” has relaunched as two separate editions and will go paid within about four weeks. But the sites will only show their homepages, not articles, to search engines. ... “When we showed it to people, that was the model they preferred,” said Times executive editor Danny Finkelstein. “We’re completely unashamed about this. We’re trying to get people to pay for the journalism and we wanted to do it in a very simple way.”

via paidcontent.org

-- Comment --

I can't help but picture Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit's front door. The blockage of the entry being blamed on two very different causes.

NewsCorp: "Oh. Well, it all comes from eating too much."
Google: "It all comes from not having front doors big enough!"

It appears search engines will not be getting "even a smidge" of content via snippet, first-view-free or other preview option on the Times sites. News Corp plans to close the door to all but paid subscribers. Content posted prior to the switch will still be available for free -- but I doubt that will present much of a lure for subscriptions. New subscribers will have to either a) already know the content is worth it or b) trust that the content will be worth the price of admission (Murdoch Sets 'Fair Price' for Digital Journalism ... @ $3 week).

Filed under // media news corp paywall seo

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [0]

April 29, 2010

Murdoch's Metrics a Private Matter

Don't look for ABC metric reports that show the expected traffic decline once the paywall is raised on two major British news sites.

The Times Online's last public metrics showed approximately 1.2M unique browsers per day. According to a recent study, News Corp should expect that number to drop to about 60,772 per day. The media giant is banking that 60K users per day paying approximately $3 a week is a better long-term strategy than trying to monetize the 1.2M non-paying visitors via advertising.

With nearly a month to go before News International raises its first paywall in June, both Times Online and Sun Online have stopped publishing their user numbers through the ABC in the UK.

Times Online’s last published traffic was 20,418,256 unique browsers in February, an average 1,215,446 a day and an average 4,980,134 daily page impressions. A third of traffic was domestic, two thirds from overseas.

Filed under // Rupert Murdoch analytics media paywall

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [0]

March 26, 2010

Murdoch Sets 'Fair Price' for Digital Journalism ... @ $3 week

The tip of the spear, sort of speak, for News Corp., will be UK's The Times and the Sunday Times publications. The company is moving ahead with a paywall strategy that rewards print subscribers with free online access. The rest will fork over about $3 a week for access come June. Will be interesting to see if they have better luck than Newsday.

The Times and the Sunday Times will form the vanguard of parent company News Corp.'s subscription plans for general news, as the U.K. newspapers move behind a paywall for the first time in June.

News International Ltd., News Corp.'s European division, said Friday the newspapers will launch separate Web sites in early May to replace the existing Times Online site. The two new sites will be available for a free trial period to registered customers, but from June will charge £1 ($1.48) for a day's access or £2 for a week. Payment will give customers access to both sites ...

News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, who said in a letter to employees last month that the company is "instituting fair pricing for digital journalism," has argued that news publishers should charge for content online that for years they have been giving away for free. The issue took on greater significance during the economic slump as advertising revenue dried up.

WSJ.com

Filed under // Rupert Murdoch content news corp newsday paywall seo

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [1]

March 17, 2010

Murdoch Blocks Meltwater From Search

Times Online Blocks Media Monitor Meltwater

Public relations news monitor Meltwater, which is still refusing to pay UK newspapers for crawling their websites, has now been blocked from indexing Times Online, the most serious of Rupert Murdoch’s UK newspapers.

The news site, which is due to go behind a paywall this spring and which had already blocked the NewsNow news monitor in January, enacted the block via the standard robots.txt protocol on Tuesday. It means thousands of Meltwater customers around the world won’t get to inform clients when their company is mentioned in The Times.

The move stems from an increasing desire, from both Murdoch’s News International specifically and the rest of the UK press, that commercial crawlers pay them to crawl their sites.

Robert Andrews
@robertandrews Mar 16, 2010 6:19 PM ET

via paidcontent.org

Interesting to note that the defining point as it relates to Rupert Murdoch is that the site Meltwater is a paid service, unlike Google, which for now is off the hook. But for how long?

Free tips on new media, analytics, SEO e-mailed direct to you.

Filed under // Rupert Murdoch media paywall seo

Get Push2Digital's SEO, Analytics tips via e-mail | Thanks, but I prefer RSS

Comments [0]

February 2, 2010

Those Who Get It ... And Those Who Will

When I first started in new media (DallasNews.com, circa 2000), a friend of mine, Mike McAllister, described his belief that there were two kinds of media people, "those who get it, and those who don't."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zooboing/ / CC BY 2.0

Well after reading more about the various pay-wall strategies out there for online media, I would like to offer my own version. There are "those who who get it, and those who soon will."

Enter Gary Pruitt, chief executive with McClatchy Co., he explained to analysts that "we tend to believe that the overwhelming model will be a free, ad-supported model." And to back that up, he reported his company's online ad revenue rose 15 percent in the fourth quarter and accounted for nearly 16 percent of total ad revenue, up 5 percent since last year.

Contrast that with Newsday, which moved its content behind a paywall in October of 2009. About 3 months later, they've sold 35 online subscriptions according to The New York Observer.

Newsday's response?

“Internal research shows that Newsday’s Web site is an extremely popular new benefit to hundreds of thousands of Long Island Cablevision households." Translation: Subscribers who don't pay

"Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday’s Web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option.” Translation: Yeah, we're not surprised 35 people subscribed, we're shocked. Maybe we should rethink this paywall thing.

There should be room for pay content when positioned smartly with additional services or more convenient delivery methods or micro payments, but throwing up the blanket pay wall seems short-sighted at best. For now, Newsday is sticking by the fact that 35 subscribers is no problem, but it's hard to imagine the exec who pitched the pay wall using a slide of subscriber projections in the double digits in the presentation.