The Times and Sunday Times‘s highly anticipated paywall starts properly today. Murdoch is going into the wilderness, charging £1 a day or £2 a week for access. The rest of print media meanwhile, watches from a safe distance to see whether The Times will come out alive, except Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who’s vowing never to subscribe to the tetchy iPad app again.
Guru-Murthy is one of a bunch of folk having trouble with the iPad app, which is reportedly crashing, even after updates. The app costs £10 a month on top of the website fee.
The Times and Sunday Times have introductory offers of £1 per week month for the moment, and the iPad will be charged separately. In the interim, users have had to register. The results of this have been that the Telegraph has picked up some of the downstream traffic, and users spend less time on The Times site, although this will have been affected by people choosing not to register.
The sites have been criticised for looking a bit like a newspaper on your screen, a definite regression for online media, so it’ll be interesting to watch how many pick it up, and how many move on.
It’s worth remembering though, that Murdoch might not need to monetise much of his audience to make The Times website profitable, and might be able to stand losing around 80% of The Times and Sunday Times’s online readership. It’s a conflict of principles – what’s more important, profits or readers?
