Online News Subscription Model a Bust in the U.K.

Posted 07/21/2010 at 6:25am | by Paul Lilly

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It's been two weeks since the popular London Times started charging a monthly subscription for online content, and so far, the results have been sobering.

According to paidContent, 15,000 paying customers have signed up for the service, which at a glance doesn't seem all that depressing. But that number represents just 10 percent of the people who participated in the free trial offered beforehand, and a mere 1.2 percent of its total readership. That's what we call perspective, folks, and it isn't pretty.

The question is, does this represent a failure of the paid subscription model, or is the fee simply too high? At $4/week, readers are being asked to fork over about $16/month to read an online rag that had previously been free (the first month runs $2). Whether or not a lower price would make a difference is a point of debate, and something Rupert Murdoch and company will have to figure out. That's right, the London Times falls under the Murdoch-owned News Corp. umbrella, which means there's little chance the subscription model will get pulled.

It's not just the U.K. that's rejecting paid news, either. As Christopher Null over at Yahoo News points out, New York-based Newsday earlier this year played around with a subscription model, and three months into the experiment, only 35 readers took the bait. A much smaller rag, granted, but not very encouraging nonetheless.