In the paid content debate, don’t forget the archive
I wonder if The Times is hedging its bets with its paywall more than we realise.
Although Rupert Murdoch’s paywall clanged down at the end of last week, the archive of material that was previously published by The Times and Sunday Times on timesonline.co.uk is still available, and still, of course, having ads served against it.
Bearing in mind that some sites get as much traffic from their archives as they do from their fresh content, that’s a reasonable amount of traffic.
Particularly as most large sites have been failing to sell out their inventory, I wonder if, in fact, News Corp has so far lost a single dollar from bringing down the wall.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
Linkedin
Whilst I love the Times – hard copy or online version, it simply doesn’t make sense for me to subscribe to receive information that I can collect for free by going to the BBC website for instance. I accept the the quality of The Times newspaper probably exceeds most of its rivals, but I am happy to get a close second, gratis, from its competitors.
I will not be subscribing.
User ID not verified.
Interesting… There was a bit of talk around the ABC that they would lock up their archives (podcasts, video, etc) as a new revenue stream while keeping all recent stuff free. I think the BBC has done something similiar…?
I know at Crikey (disclosure: where I work) the pay wall comes down for a fortnight with all the archives older than that kept free. The theory being, the vast majority of value in newsy stuff is in reading it within that window.
So archives certainly have value. But do you extract the most value out of them by using them as an incentive to subscribe, or to keep your web hits ticking over? Interesting debate…
User ID not verified.