Murdoch London Papers Take Ad Hit Due To Pay Walls
September 02, 2010 10:25 am ET by Joe Strupp
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is reportedly taking an advertising hit at its London dailies, The Times and the Sunday Times, which recently erected pay walls, according to The Independent.
The Independent reports ads are down some 90% on those sites:
Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, "We are just not advertising on it. If there's no traffic on there, there's no point in advertising on there." Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. "That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it's a reflection on reality or not, I don't know."
He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. "Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites - it's not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration."
Others have their concerns. Adrian Drury, a media analyst at Ovum who has studied the impact of paywalls, says. "Fundamentally, at a brand-value level, you are killing the idea of times.co.uk as a channel choice for news online. That is something that is very difficult to recover." There is also a widespread lack of enthusiasm for the new look Times website. "The most disappointing thing for me is that there doesn't seem to have been any strategy to create unique, compelling content that would differentiate the online product," says Paul Bradshaw, a specialist in new media journalism.
Many wonderfully liberal and mainstream media companies have or will try this too. And its not "greed" to want to get paid for a product. I would argue its greedy for us to expect everything for free, even though it actually costs something to create content.
I hate Murdoch, but its not unreasonable for a newspaper, record company, video game maker, magazine, TV network, book publisher, or the actors, reporters, engineers, studio musicians, authors, editors, secretaries, and yes, executives who work to create and distribute such content get paid.
Advertising is not and will not for the foreseeable future be enough to pay for this.
MOST of Media Matters sources used to disprove disinformation are in danger of becoming extinct in the near future because they are hemorrhaging money. This is why all the movie studios, networks, news outlets, etc, are thinking of trying something, anything, to create more revenue. Even what Murdoch has done.
And the WSJ, which has a paywall, is just about the ONLY paper to make more money, not less, these days. The other is the more liberal Economist, also with a partial paywall.