The Guardian’s analysis of behind-the-paywall traffic at The Times and The Sunday Times, reported exclusively by Press Gazette this morning, offers something new: an assessment of how many subscribers are actually visiting the sites. The official numbers for pure-play digital subscriptions from Wapping, published in early November, told us something about conversions. Likewise the recently-publicised survey [...]
Conventional wisdom suggests that the Guardian will emerge as one of the champions of free-to-air digital content when the Times and Sunday Times erect their paywalls in June. This, after all, is a newspaper that employs Jeff Jarvis as a columnist. We’ve also witnessed Emily Bell, GNM’s director of digital content, arguing that general news paywalls [...]
And lo, the Jesus tablet came among us. Predictably, the fan boy sites are focusing on the form factor and tech specs. It’s a 1GHz computer with a touchscreen interface. Apple will be making its own CPU (the technology involved is challenging, to say the least). Physically, it looks like an outsized iPhone, or an [...]
A few months back, Emily Bell, The Guardian’s director of digital content, promised that the debate about paywalls would become “a new battleground of publishing ideologies”. Sadly, the debate has so far produced no more than rhetoric – enough of it, surely, to power half-a-dozen general elections and a lifetime’s supply of Prime Minister’s Questions. [...]
Yes, I know. This kind of exercise has been done before. But mostly in the US. (If a similar exercise exists for UK markets, apologies: send me a link and I’ll append it to the bottom of this post.) In any event: given Rupert Murdoch’s enthusiasm for paywalls, I wanted to figure out what Times [...]
The recession will have some positive side effects for Big Media. Among them: a massive cull of the tech-flavoured start-ups that aimed to siphon off a large portion of the media’s advertising revenues. The business models underpinning social media and user-generated content are in big, big trouble. Funding is drying up. The space available for [...]