[DeletedUser]

1) Is the paywall working?

According to the data, particularly the revenues and operating costs of Exhibit 3, the paywall is not working. Not to mention the fact that this has been tried several times before and has not succeeded. Other attributes that may prevent their paywall from working are the “leaky paywall” designs. By allowing their content to be accessed from social media sites, platforms that have billions of users, they may immediately remove themselves from that pool of paid subscribers as the content is available for free from those links. Once gates like that are open, it is very near impossible to shut them again.

3) Why are newspapers in trouble? What is the goal of the Times and creating a paywall?

Newspapers are in trouble because of the digital age. With the advancements in technology that are continuously being made and the plethora of information that is available online, the need or want for hardcopy items are quickly diminishing. This definitely applies to more than just newspapers and a case in point would be encyclopedias. Encyclopedias were the go-to for information throughout my junior high, high school and college days. This could be said for newspapers as well. Newspapers were the go-to for information regarding local, national and worldly information. Their rise to fame was well before any other types of communication for such were even invented. The spreading of news and events via written text have been well documented throughout history, but the invention of the printing press in 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg would change how this information was delivered forever.

As this technology advanced into what we know now as the common newspaper, no one could have guessed how far technology would go and how much it would influence our society. No thought was put into planning for the future of newspapers because it was assumed that they would always be around, how could they not? By making this assumption and not understanding what the future would bring, they essentially failed to plan for that outcome that they now face.

As technology has become ever more present through the likes of social media, blogs, etc. all aspects of the newspapers revenue have been affected. Classifieds, personals, advertising, the stories themselves; all have been brought forwarded upon these new channels and the companies that were using these newspapers have now discovered that they can accomplish the same effect with a lower cost to themselves buy marketing their own advertising on the same platforms that was essentially backdooring the newspapers paywall setup, again through the “leaky paywall”.

By creating a paywall, the Times was likely hoping to up the revenue by going online to compensate for their belief of of their downward slide in their hardcopy print. Perhaps they thought that they would corner the digital world and continue to maintain all of their current clients (or sponsors in the case of advertising). However, by not sticking to their guns and sticking to a bulletproof paywall, a new problem was introduced and this could partly be responsible for their continued downward slide in the parking rate the stupid structure revenue that they had hoped to gain. The influx of new users could possibly be attributed to just that, the newness of it all. Consumers are apt to easily get wrapped up in the “next, latest and greatest thing” and certainly offering their paper on an iPad would trigger this type of movement. As the newness wares off however, as all things eventually do, and the way that the content was provided (and then not provided) its almost like they unknowingly built a poison pill into their paywall model. The first iteration did not work out as tech just was not what it was even then as it is now and they still perhaps did not see what the future would bring. Perhaps if they would have stuck with original plan, it would have worked out today quite a bit more in their favor. It is hard to guess this though and one major likely fault to all of this was the assumption that news papers would always be around, that it was set in stone and that their longstanding clients that they provided for would also always be there, another damaging assumption. They didn’t read far enough ahead to see that the clients they had might take to their own form of advertising etc. on these new platforms.

4) Should the times actively manage to transition from print to digital?

While all signs of everything in this day and age point going to digital and though they realize this, at this point, it almost seems too little too late. Mistakes were made in establishing what it was that they wanted to do and how they were to go about doing so and this will severely affect them in moving forward. With the transition that is being made to digital and the exponential growth of the digital market that is seen today, one would think that they should try to manage their transition from print to digital. However, looking at the statistics from Exhibit 3, circulation revenues are the only thing that increased in the measured times. Are these hardcopy circulations? If they are to manage this transition properly, one thing that should be addressed is the presence of their “leaky paywall”. However, it may be too late for this and by removing this feature from their clients in the platforms that they are promoted on, anger and frustrations about their services could, and possibly would, become prevalent and in essence they could be removing advertising from their own self by not being on these platforms.