The Times becomes a subscription website

Greenlizard0

Greenlizard0

Greenlizard0

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Well, I guess the free model couldn't sustain itself which is such a pity. To be fair we were warned about this months ago. It's annoying that (as far as I know) only The Times, has started this. I don't know why any of the **** rags, most notably The Daily Mail are subscriber only yet. Heck it'd probably stop people reading them. :p

Hopefully the quality of English will improve. There are quite a few spelling and grammar errors in some of their articles.

It's £2/week which is great value compared to the paper version (90p/ £1) here.

Who's sticking with them? If not, where are you guys going?
 
Sticking with The Times. Got my free login for time being and will pay when prompted. Paired with FT, and BBC it's all the news I need :)
 
I get the paper free at work. This sounds pretty stupid as no one else is charging at the minute they could really lose readers! I guess they are trailing it to see how it goes.
 
Never read them - never going to read them :p

How do they expect to continue when major news sites such as BBC News are online and giving it away for free (Or I suppose for your TV licence fee :p)
 
FT website: you now need to pay
Me: I don't want to pay
FT: You have to
Me: I'm going to stop advertising with you
FT: Ok

I understand that they have to take an early stand, and we're just a small customer to them, but we've already spent over £60,000 advertising with them this year and they couldn't even see fit to give out 5 free subscriptions to my team.

I'm not going to advertise with a site / publication that then requires my potential customers to have to pay to see my adverts and other content. The FT can **** off.
 
The_Abyss said:
FT website: you now need to pay
Me: I don't want to pay
FT: You have to
Me: I'm going to stop advertising with you
FT: Ok

I understand that they have to take an early stand, and we're just a small customer to them, but we've already spent over £60,000 advertising with them this year and they couldn't even see fit to give out 5 free subscriptions to my team.

I'm not going to advertise with a site / publication that then requires my potential customers to have to pay to see my adverts and other content. The FT can **** off.
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To be honest - if I ever paid for a news website subscription - the least I would expect would be for it to be news without any advertisements...
 
They're just going to drive most readers elsewhere as with every other media outlet that becomes subscription based, less hits will hurt their advertising income I would've thought.
 
Marky said:
To be honest - if I ever paid for a news website subscription - the least I would expect would be for it to be news without any advertisements...
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This is what I'm hoping would have happened, but I'm guessing not.

This is something that ****s me off to be honest, if I pay for something, I damn well want it to be free of adverts. eBay annoy me (even further) because of this. They profit from each transaction yet banners and that Experian ad still appear.
 
I'm registered and have both newspapers in print each week. I may subscribe but with so much news around online during the day I don't yet know whether I will. The printed versions of both papers give me all I need so I probably won’t.
 
Most of the times I've ended up at The Times were via Google. Since they're also blocking that, I guess they won't be getting any more pageviews from me.

I wouldn't expect an advert-free zone. You get adverts in newspapers you buy from a shop, so why should the web version be any different?
 
Moses99p said:
Lol @ being shocked by adverts in a paid for service. Surely it's better to pay £2 per week and have some adverts which really aren't intrusive, as opposed to having to pay £5 per week (or whatever arbitrary figure you want to come up with) and having no adverts whatsoever.

It's a case of x + y = z

x being the subscription charge, y being the advertising revenue and z being the figure News Corp want to get in.

With the Ebay example... yes, you already pay fees... but you'd complain more if fees were doubled to get rid of adverts completely, wouldn't you?
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I would yes, but in all fairness these are all profit driven organisations. That I'm not complaining about though.

My point is they're taking in ad money because they can whilst the quality of the service on offer doesn't necessarily increase. I don't believe for one second that ad money AND a subscription is necessary because often there are plenty of equivalents without them. It can be a situation where a particular few choose to maintain profit margins above anything else. The eBay example, well, it's not like the service has changed that much over the years but to sell on there has become increasingly extortionate over the same period of time. So while fees rise, we still get ads, but the service hasn't changed. It's not a case of doubling the fees to get rid of the ads, because it's not like the company would suddenly fold if we didn't directly pay more.

Also, have you tried using The Times website without ads? It's a much, much better experience.
 
I normally check Google News for a compilation of the days news and go to an article to check out the full story. There are so many other news places online like BBC, Telegraph, etc that are free and listed on google news that I won't miss the Times.

I find checking google news where there are a lot of compilation of different news types give me a broad range of stuff to read too.
 
Moses99p said:
Well, doesn't The Times (or the online part) lose money? So advertising revenue wasn't enough, and adding a subscription charge is a way to try and break even.
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The Time and Sunday Times, both online and newspaper lose money had over fist. So does The Guardian and most newspapers. Newspaper circulation rates in the UK have dropped 27% since 2007.

The most recent polls show that 25% of readers are considering paying the subscription. This business plan aims for a 4% conversion rate, so they could actually come ot of this smelling of roses.

Yes, they are going to drive visitors away, but if they aren't gaining revenue form those visitors then good riddance.

The model is aimed at targetting a much smaller group of users, building relationships with them and then cross selling other products.
 
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Ice Rich said:
Can anyone expand on this please.
What exactly are you getting over the BBC viewers?
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You are getting the style of presentation, journalism and articles that you like to read. I read The Times because I like it. If generally offers more depth than the BBC on the subjects I'm interested in.
 
Definatley not, anything to make money - offer something free to hook customers in (tv advert lol) then start charging, sorry their scheme hasn't worked for me!
 
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