News Corp. said Tuesday that it had attracted 105,000 paying customers to the digital versions of The Times and The Sunday Times of London since it started charging for access to their Web sites in June.
The company said “around half” of these were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest are occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, News Corp. said.
News Corp.’s initiative has been closely watched among media analysts and advertisers because The Times and Sunday Times are among the first prominent general interest newspapers to erect “pay walls” around their digital content. Other newspapers are also moving to introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers’ hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue.
“These figures very clearly show that large numbers of people are willing to pay for quality journalism in digital formats,” said Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, the London-based arm of News Corp. that publishes The Times papers.
News Corp., which already charges for access to The Wall Street Journal, recently extended its paid content plans, championed by the company’s chief executive, Rupert Murdoch, by moving another British newspaper, the tabloid News of the World, behind a pay wall.
The conventional wisdom among media analysts has been that it would difficult to persuade readers to pay for general news online, given the panoply of free news available on the Web. By contrast, some specialty publications in areas like business and finance have had modest success with pay walls.
The Financial Times, for example, says it has attracted 189,000 paying customers for its Web site, which uses a “metered” model, giving online readers a limited number of free articles every month before charges kick in. The New York Times, publisher of the International Herald Tribune, has said it plans to take a similar approach when it begins charging for its Web site next year.
At News Corp.’s British papers, the pay walls are less porous, requiring readers to pay to view anything other than the home pages. The Times and Sunday Times charge £1 a day, or £2 a week, for access. The iPad app costs £9.99 pounds a month, or about $16.
When it switched to a paid model, News Corp. estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent.
In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the pay wall went up.
Many of those visitors do not go beyond the home pages. But News Corp. has said the newspapers will benefit despite drawing smaller audiences, because it can sell more focused advertising, as well as generating new revenue from subscribers. Ad numbers were not reported Tuesday.
Jim Chisholm, a newspaper consultant in Lille, France, said News Corp.’s announcement left some unanswered questions for advertisers. The big unknown, he said, was how much time users were spending on the sites. Some of the reported customers or registered users might simply be visiting once, to read a single article, making them less valuable to advertisers.
“Much as we all want newspapers to succeed and make money, in a market as rough and crowded as the U.K., The Times pay wall was always going to be a tall order,” he said.
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