Timesonline has announced today that it will start charging for its online content with effect from June. The daily charge will be £1; a week’s access will cost £2.
John Witherow, editor of the Sunday Times, points out that the charging structure will be the equivalent of a cup of coffee a day. Fair point, but the site is still likely to lose thousands of readers, who have become used to unlimited free content on the web.
No doubt other online news sites will be carefully watching the Timesonline experiment before deciding whether to follow suit.
Perosnally, I may be tempted to subscribe on a weekly basis if the product is sufficiently attractive. Timesonline says that it will be offering a free trial period, which I think will be crucial to the decisions of many as to whether or not to sign up.
I can’t see how charging for access to a news site is attractive to Internet users. Sure, they may very well get a handful of people willing to pay £2 per week to read the news on their site, and that may well make up for the lose in revenue from advertising, but are they actually going to gain anything significant from this?
I could understand charging if it were a specialist newspaper, such as the Financial Times, or The Sporting Life, but for daily newspaper to charge, just seems plain silly. I could well be that they just want readers to recognise the monitory value of journalism, but i doubt it. News Corp don’t do ethics.
Ultimately i return to the basic question. Would i be willing to pay for access to news content? I don’t think i would be. The Time aren’t going to publish different news stories from the free sites. It is not a choice between news or no news. It is a choice between paying for news or getting the same news for free elsewhere. It’s a no brainer which option wins.