Tag Archives: Sydney Morning Herald

AFR online

Australia’s positive paywall experience

AFR online

AFR online

Newspaper paywalls are not the magic bullet publishers like Rupert Murdoch hoped for.

On the other hand, they haven’t failed.

Evidence from paywall projects in Australia suggest they have a role as news publishers stumble from print into the digital age. Australia’s two national daily newspapers both now have paywalls.

Writing at ComputerWorld Australia, Andrew Birmingham reads the entrails from The Australian Financial Review and The Australian.

Birmingham’s conclusion isn’t optimistic or pessimistic. He  says results to date provide enough positive news for the publishers to convince themselves they have a fighting chance.

He is too gloomy. While Fairfax and News Corporation may struggle, the evidence points to something better than a mere fighting chance for publishers, at least online if not for their print operations.

Australia’s great paywalls

Six months ago The Financial Review changed from hiding almost all content behind a paywall to a more open model. It made online content available to print subscribers and halved the price of digital-only subscriptions.

Around the same time New Corporation introduced a paywall at its flagship paper The Australian and began selling sensibly priced bundles of print and digital subscriptions.

Last week, Fairfax said it will introduce paywalls for the online editions of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Numbers not bad

Six months after changes at the Fin and The Australian, Birmingham found an overall disappointing picture: paywalls did little to stem falling print reader numbers and failed to increase the overall pool of paid readers.

Page impressions at The Australian fell 35% after introducing the paywall. Unique browsers fell 25%.  The Fin’s relaxed paywall saw page impressions climb 82%. Unique browsers climbed 80%.

I’d say these numbers are positive and set the scene for the next stage.

Metros go behind the paywall

Next year when The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age are behind paywalls, there will be fewer plausible free alternatives to The Fin and The Australian.

While there will be plenty of niche options, the only sizeable, credible free online source of Australian general news will be the ABC. Some might argue sites like NineMSN and Yahoo will plug the gap, but they offer a very different news experience.

This will strengthen the paywall strategies at News Corporation and The Financial Review.

Now put advertising in the mix

Paywalls help news publishers distinguish their sites from the rest of the web with advertisers. Today’s free newspaper websites generally feature a cluttered mess filled with nasty cheap advertisements. The Financial Review on the other hand has a clear design with a limited number of appropriate and, presumably premium-paying advertisers.

Whatever the details, a paywall means a publisher can move beyond whatever-dollars-we-can-get advertising and start to think strategically about sales. Advertising is, ironically, where publishers have most to gain from selling digital subscriptions to readers.

Apart from anything else, a paying reader is clearly committed and solvent.

Conclusion

  • Paywalls have proved less of a turn off than many feared.
  • Paywalls mean more income.
  • Now competitors have paywalls, Australia’s existing paywall publishers are no longer out on a limb.
  • Paywall readers are better advertising targets. They will lead to higher cpms (revenue per served advertisement).

Publishers aren’t out of the woods by any standard, but there are grounds for limited optimism.

Related articles

 

The Australian’s annoying paywall quirk

As newspaper paywalls go, The Australian’s isn’t bad.

The A$8 a week charge for a print and on-line subscription seems reasonable. If I lived in Australia I’d take the offer.

There is an annoying quirk. Although the paywall keeps me logged on all day once I’ve entered my email address and password, the site doesn’t this information between sessions. I can’t save log-in details in my browser or with LastPass.

This means I have to manually log-in with a password the first time I visit the site each session.  While this isn’t a big deal, the it slows me down when I’m in a hurry.

Fairfax’s bloated, overweight Stuff

In the last hour I checked the size of the front page of six news web sites using http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com. Here are the results:

So you can read the Radio New Zealand News page 200 times and still download less data than a single read of Stuff.

While these numbers may not be important if you’ve got broadband and an unlimited download plan, they make a huge difference when you are on the end of a slow link or paying through the nose for each megabyte of data.

None of the sites attempted to show one of those awful TV style advertisements during this test. I hate to think what they might add to the totals.

Update: The National Business Review weighs in at 398Kb.

Australia speeds skilled migrant entry

Despite the global financial meltdown and widespread lay-offs, Australia still faces serious skills shortages. The obvious answer is to drag in workers with the right qualifications and experience from overseas.

It’s not hard to attract skilled people to Australia; from many places overseas it can almost look like a Shangri-la. However, the bureaucratic hoops are daunting and, technology skills requirements are a fast-moving target so often, by the time applications are processed, employers demands have changed.

Today’s The Australian Financial Review reports the way the country grants overseas technology professionals entry to the country is set for an overhaul in IT projects force migration target change (the story is behind a paywall). There’s a similar report at The Sydney Morning Herald : Migration rules set for revamp.

This is going to propel Australia’s economy. There are a number of big tech projects underway and a shortage of suitably skilled people to do the work. I’d like to see New Zealand take similar measures to make sure our nation had the skills it needs to compete on the world stage. Taking unemployed or under-employed professionals from the US, UK and other northern hemisphere countries that can’t or won’t make use of them makes a lot of sense.

Kindle: Fairfax, News Corp say no

Not only did Australia’s two main print news media organisations reject Amazon’s Kindle book reader, both made their rejection public.

Fairfax went overboard, publishing versions of the story in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and on its youth-focused site, The Vine. It didn’t run in The Australian Financial Review.

News Corporation has been less vocal, although Rupert Murdoch did mention his dissatisfaction with the reader in comments after his company’s annual results.

As this story in The Sydney Morning Herald explains, the problem is Amazon wants to clip the ticket by too much. Some reports suggest the company takes as much as 70 percent of the price of ebook sales and is seeking similar high margins from newspaper subscriptions.

Sony and Apple are possible alternatives. One aspect of this story is the assumption people will want to read online newspapers via a special reader and not with a PC or smartphone.

Kindle Rejected By Australian Newspapers | Fairfax Media, News Corporation.

Fairfax to follow Murdoch, charge for online news

Jumbled signals coming from Fairfax, but the message is clear. Australia and New Zealand’s largest publisher plans to follow Murdoch and charge for online news.

The signals are confused because on Friday, Stephen Hutcheon at the Sydney Morning Herald wrote a story about readers’ reluctance to pay for online news.

On one level Hutcheon’s Not happy, Rupert: readers say they won’t pay for online news was a dig at rival News Corporation – complete with an unflattering photograph of Rupert Murdoch. He says News’ announcement was followed by 140 reader comments – mainly from angry readers threatening to go elsewhere when charges apply.

Clearly Fairfax’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing because Sunday saw Tom Hyland write Fairfax, News to charge for online at The Age website. He also wrote the longer Stop the presses. Hyland had the unenviable job of quoting Fairfax chief executive Brian McCarthy who told him; “charging for online access was essential if publishers were to maintain their newsroom staff.”

You always know things are going to get tricky when a newspaper executive uses a word like ‘monetising’ and Hyland quotes McCarthy getting his teeth around that in the very next paragraph. He went on to talk about a two-level model at the The Age and the The Sydney Morning Herald websites.

Of course Fairfax is no stranger to charging for online content. The company’s The Australian Financial Review has long been one of the region’s few major titles to charge readers. By all accounts the AFR’s paywall hasn’t been successful, but it will have taught the company useful lessons about turning reader clicks into money.