The Strategic Issue of Newspaper Paywalls Essay

The Strategic Issue of Newspaper Paywalls - Essay ExampleThe defenders lead media blogger Cory Doctorow led the critical analysis in asking three main questions about the dataset as presented by Murdochs company. (Doctorow, 2010) What sort of purchases are the paid subscribers making? How much do advertisers value the additional culture the Times can supply about paying users? What does it cost to get a subscriber? These questions are important in determining what the paywall and subscriber verse mean to News Corps bottom line profit figures. This experiment with the online subscriber model for news is important to the sector due to the declining r until nowues and unsuccessful person of many traditional newspapers. If News Corp is successful in attracting consumers to its online subscription models, iPad only newspaper, and financial industry news, then it represents a business possibility or even necessity for other newspapers in the sector like the Guardian to follow. Looking at the actual verse released by News Corp in their Nov. 2nd, 2010 express release News International today announces that the new digital products for The Times and The Sunday Times have achieved more than 105,000 paid-for customer sales to date. Around half(a) of these are monthly subscribers. These include subscribers to the digital sites as well as subscribers to The Times iPad app and Kindle edition. Many of the rest are either single copy or pay-as-you-go customers. In addition to the digital-only subscribers, there are 100,000 joint digital/print subscribers who have activated their digital accounts to the websites and/or iPad app since launch. As a result, the substance paid audience for digital products on The Times and The Sunday Times is close to 200,000 (allowing for some duplication in the digital customer sales number). (Paid Content, 2010) Felix chromatic adds another aspect of the paywall that may not be immediately evident from this news release, reporting tha t traffic has fallen off a cliff, from 21 meg to 2.7 million pageviews per month for these same sites. (Reuters, 2010) From these statistics, the 200,000 paid subscribers are only viewing on average 10 pages or news articles per month. This does not indicate a strong pattern of readership, but more of the average daily or single-setting news content of a site browser. In analyzing the effect of this, for example, as it relates to the Guardian business plan, it should be noted that by page volume this is approximately a 90% reduction in the number of advertisements served by the website per month. Thus, looking at the issue of paywalls and online newspapers from a strictly profit and red perspective, the GMG can calculate whether a 90% reduction in advertising revenue would be counteract by the savings on server infrastructure with reduced site traffic and the revenues generated by the subscription fees. To put this in context with what the News Corp numbers mean, Dan Sabbagah of the Guardian reviewed the three different subscription plans represented in the statistics and came up with an estimate the total is ?5.5m a year, gross. (Sabbagah, 2010) This includes the 1-day subscriptions, the monthly subscriptions, and iPad newspaper subscriptions. In this manner, it could be related that loss of 90% of site traffic and viewership for the newspapers was not worth the minimal