[LINK] News Corp paywalls

[Tom Koltai]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au 
> [mailto:link-bounces at mailman.anu.edu.au] On Behalf Of Jan Whitaker
> Sent: Tuesday, 7 June 2011 6:36 PM
> To: link at anu.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [LINK] News Corp paywalls
> 
> 
> At 04:32 PM 7/06/2011, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
> >New York Times Co. said last month that its push to charge 
> the online 
> >readers of its flagship newspaper is faring better than 
> expected, with 
> >more than 100,000 people having paid for online access since 
> it began 
> >charging readers three weeks earlier.
> 
> 1. The NYT isn't exactly the Herald Sun or The Australian.
> 
> 
> >Although The Times of London experienced a sharp decline in 
> web traffic 
> >when its paywall went up last year, Freudenstein said it's 
> making more 
> >money from its 79,000 digital subscribers than it did from the 20 
> >million unique browsers it used to have.
> 
> 2. Gee. 1 = 1.
> 79,000 X $n > 20,000,000 X $0 Wow! They can do math!
> 
> Jan

What they're saying to their shareholders is:

Don't worry about the advertising revenue that we lost because we no
longer have 20 million readers... We're now making money from
Subscribers.. Yay!!!!

Having paid for advertising in Newspapers, I think that no matter what
they charge for Subscriptions, it will never match the revenue from
three percent of twenty million clicking the clickthrus...

20,000,000 * 3% =  600,000 * $0.22 (clickthru value - conservative) per
day = $132,000
Subscriptions ?  (100,000 * .99/28 days =) $3535.71 per day.

So they are only losing their shareholders $128,464.29 per day.
Mind you that's from the first four weeks for 99 cents model... Lets see
how they do after a few months have passed and the early adopters either
drop of or churn to another cheap intro offer...

If however they maintain their subscribers, then that means a revenue of
$1,999,984 per month ($71,428 per day)

Then again, that's interesting stats. 

NY = 8,175,133 (2010 Pop. - Source WikiP - The five burroughs) therefore
subscriber penetration = 0.012232217% versus what they used to have...
2.446443379%

I'm sure the advertisers don’t mind at all.

Lets see what theor 2010 annual rep[ort said:

Quote/
Several years ago, The Times integrated its advertising sales team as
well as its print and digital news operation. Today
roughly 80% of The Times’s top 100 advertisers make advertising buys
across its print and digital products to maximize
adjacency opportunities with compelling content that reaches a highly
affluent and influential audience.
The Company’s total digital revenues increased 15% to $387 million in
2010 compared with 2009, and accounted for
more than 16% of overall revenue. The management team continues its
focus on diversifying revenue streams and
strengthening our digital businesses, using technology and product
innovation to enhance the user experience across
multiple platforms.
/Quote

My guess is the 2011 numbers won’t be quite so healthy. 1.9 million per
month times 12 months is only  23,999,808.00 or six percent of last
years numbers.

One of their principle problems is that their online pricing is almost
identical to their home delivered pricing.
In other words, there would appear to be no value to the print version
(as subscribers get access free to the online version as well.)
An interesting marketing ploy. Charge the same for hardcopy and digital
copy.

Yet, to retain their unrealistic Goodwill asset valuation they need to
keep the presses running.

Hmmmm... Wouldn’t like to be the NYT auditor when the solid methane
splatters. It must be someones fault...  

References
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