The Times’s pay wall would not sustain its daily losses?
17/04/2010– Note: this is a fragment from my dissertation looking into The Google Effect on Newspapers’ Websites. This excerpt refers to pay walls as revenue streams.
The first Murdoch UK titles to raise pay walls are The Times and The Sunday Times. Starting June 2010, the sites will charge for content online, £1 for a day’s access and £2 for a week’s subscription, for both editions of the papers.
In perspective, The Times reportedly loses around £240,000 per day. A Guardian report from March 2010 estimates that the pay walls for The Times and The Sunday Times would bring around £1.83 million over a month if only 5% of the users pay for the daily fees, or £3.66 million per month at a 10% pay wall conversion rate. If the weekly £2 pass is chosen, the revenues for the paper would be considerably lower.
These estimates were based on the February 2010 ABCe figures, which indicate the two sites had a total of 1.22 million visitors per day. The Time’s monthly visitors numbers fell to 20.42 million from 21.4 million in January 2010.
A Pew study found that out of those who have a favourite news website (35% of the total surveyed), only 19% would be willing to pay for news online. For The Times’ impending pay wall, these figures would equate to around 133,000 visitors paying for news, either £1 per day or £2 per week. The Times could make somewhere between £133,000 per day or £266,000 per week, from subscriptions only.
The maximum figures for a week would be only able to cover the losses The Times makes per day.
The advertising revenue was not included in this calculation. This was calculated with the ABCe figures for the month. If calculated with daily average visitors figures, it would equate to only around £81,130 earned per day through pay walls alone.
