{"id":1429,"date":"2013-08-07T08:21:01","date_gmt":"2013-08-07T07:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/?p=1429"},"modified":"2013-10-11T08:11:04","modified_gmt":"2013-10-11T07:11:04","slug":"after-paywalls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/2013\/08\/07\/after-paywalls\/","title":{"rendered":"The Paywall Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/1375859915.jpg\" title=\"The National Conversation\" class=\"aligncenter size-full\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" \/><br \/>\nAnother day, another step closer to the coming age of the newspaper paywall in Ireland. Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pwc.com\/outlook\">PriceWaterhouseCoopers <\/a> making self assured statements on the impending digital bonanza. <\/p>\n<p>As the money they can charge for ads (and the number of ads) sags the Irish newspapers have become <a href=\"http:\/\/www.villagemagazine.ie\/index.php\/2013\/07\/sun-shines-behind-wall\/\">addicted to talking about, and preparing for,<\/a> the crock of gold that charging their readers seems to represent. <\/p>\n<p>So, what will happen when the day comes? <\/p>\n<p>Well, the experience of other major news brand paywalls suggests they will <a href=\"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2010\/11\/02\/times-paywall-4-million-readers\/\">lose 90% of their readers overnight<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>For the Times of London, that meant they went from about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/media\/2010\/jul\/20\/times-paywall-readership\">1.2 million visitors a day to  around 100,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Here in Ireland,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.digitaltimes.ie\/digitalmedia\/comscore-lists-the-top-five-irish-digital-publishers\/\"> Comscore figures for Dec 2012 <\/a>showed the Irish Times had 628,000 visitors a month. Using the 90% rule of thumb, we can expect that to fall to approx 62,800 per month. <del>Or, if you prefer, an average of about 2,098 visitors a day. <\/del><\/p>\n<p>Using the same basic formula, the Irish Independent&#8217;s website can expect 91,900 unique monthly readers <del>3,063 (and a third) daily readers<\/del>, post-paywall.<\/p>\n<p>If those numbers come to pass, the Irish newspapers are basically embracing oblivion as a national voice online. <\/p>\n<p>Ironically, this week&#8217;s purchase of The Washington Post by Jeff Bezos suggests that by giving up their influence, they may be throwing aside the one thing they have that people still want.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Numbers, numbers. They fascinate me but I should know by now I can&#8217;t touch them without getting burnt.<\/p>\n<p>As patiently explained to me (repeatedly, as I couldn&#8217;t understand it the first few times) my figures for projected unique monthly readers are likely accurate. But when I divided them by 30 to get a daily readership, I erred. ( I&#8217;m paraphrasing. They may have used words other than erred) <\/p>\n<p>Basically, this would only work if all paying subscribers to these websites only read them once a month. This seems an unlikely assumption to make. <\/p>\n<p>So, to recap, unique monthly readers still likely to be down 90% but daily reader numbers impossible to predict without knowing what proportion of subscribers typically read daily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New figures suggest that after paywalls, Irish newspaper websites will struggle.","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1427,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[422],"tags":[177],"class_list":["post-1429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-newspapers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1429"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1488,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1429\/revisions\/1488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tuppenceworth.ie\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}