Chairman Rupert, The Times paywall, and agitation on the pond ...

(Above: welcome to The Times and shake those red back spiders out of your purse or wallet please).

Here at the pond, we're following the rise and fall of the seasons and the fate of Chairman Rupert's paywall for The Times with a kind of hushed, breathless anticipation.

Of course it's a long game, and it will take a year to play out, but being afflicted with acid flashbacks, it's easy to get caught up in the daily fun.

The Guardian in particular has been making hay while The Times' doors stay shut on the sunshine.

Here's Media Monkey at work in Times paywall shuts the door on its own contributors:

A disgruntled hack pings Monkey: "Among those no longer able to access the Times online content are all the freelances that contribute to the paper from outside Wapping Towers. No provision has been made to give them some sort of log-on or password so that they could, you know, do radical stuff like read their own copy, see if anyone has commented (unlikely, obviously, since no one will be reading it) or even read what they wrote last week. I know. I am one." Oops.

Of course we can't link to anything at The Times, but you can drop in to The Guardian any old time and say hello to the fine folk there.

You might like to check out John Naughton's piece, Will the paywall work? Thanks to Murdoch, we'll soon find out:

There's an entertaining video in which various Times columnists explain how terribly excited they are to be pioneers in this brave new world. But when one wanders around their new sandpit, it's hard to see what's really distinctive about it. Mostly, it looks like any newspaper website. Which leads one to ask: what exactly does Murdoch think he's doing?

It's a big mystery. The blogosphere thinks he's nuts to imagine that people will pay for the kind of online content offered by the Times and the Sunday Times. (There's no disagreement that people will pay – sometimes handsomely – for specialist content such as that provided by the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Economist, to name but three; it's the viability of general content that's in question.)

The media broadly agree with the bloggers, but won't say so in public, partly because Murdoch is such a big beast in their jungle, partly because they secretly hope that he's right, and partly because he has a track record of making risky bets that came good (think Sky and Fox News.) If he is right about charging for content, publishers can stop seeing the internet as a nightmare and start thinking about it as the kind of commercial opportunity that comes only once in a lifetime.

There's more, but being fair use minded, why not give him a click to read (if only to learn more about the details required to register, and The Times' optimistic expectation of reader ages, allowing those born in 1880 to subscribe).

You might also like to catch up on the treacherous legal eagle blogger, BabyBarista, who fled from the paywall to join The Guardian's camp, here. The cad ... (and here's The Guardian crowing about the switch).

We were intrigued by wavemetrix research into the new business model, Users switch readership as Times paywall goes live, which handily put the data into easy to digest pie graphs. We love our graphs here at the pond, as it helps with the acid flashbacks:

Strangely, the Abbie Hoffman steal this book syndrome is strong amongst online consumers:

Feel the force of the free Luke. And who will benefit Obi Wan?


Well it's easy to see why Chairman Rupert maintained his war of words against the Beeb. Be very afraid, antipodean ABC, when the Chairman's paywall reaches Australia's shores.

But that's not the only research doing the rounds, as we read in Times Readership Plummets Behind Paywall:

So what has happened so far? You’ve guessed it – the online readership of the site has dropped to an all-time low. The Times market share that was previously reaching highs of around 5% is now struggling to reach a share of 2%, with the latest figures floating around 1.8%. The site has also had a lower viewing time from visitors, down to three minutes from five.

The visitors of the times have been moving towards other newspaper websites outside of the paywall instead. Some, such as the Guardian, created special ‘welcome’ articles introducing the new readers to the site.

The funny thing is of course that when The Times was free, we still went to The Guardian, because they have a more open, better designed, and more inviting web site, with lots of add ons and good reasons and ways to explore the content. They get the intertubes in a way that The Times never did. So long as they offer a free model, along with the Beeb, The Times will be on a hiding to nothing. And here's The Guardian welcoming former Times readers. Oh cruel cardigan wearing lefties ...

It's hard not to share the pain of journalists who on one level would like to see Chairman Rupert succeed - and so show that intellectual property is valued by the end user - and yet on another wouldn't mind the beast failing.

You can see this at work in 'Why Google Newspass will work and the Times paywall will fail'.

And others gnaw on the same bone, as you can find in this aggregation of content under the header The Great Paywall, with links to others joining in the ongoing debate. I especially liked this offering from Martin King, in The Times, they are a-charging - but for all of us?:

I worked for the Times website more than 11 years ago. Even then, Rupert Murdoch was pressuring for a paywall – and that time he listened to the clamour of executives telling him that it would kill the site.

Would drivers on a motorway queue for tolls in the middle lane if the other two lanes were free?

Well of course I'd queue for a toll in the middle lane if I could drive at 200 kilometres an hour, and there's the rub, you need to offer something in return for the cash, a value exchange, and The Times didn't work for me free, so it's unlikely to work on a pay basis when the full to overflowing intertubes is rich with alternatives. To corral the likes of me, Chairman Rupert will need a lot of other sites to put up paywalls, and not just Time magazine, which would have to pay me to number me amongst its readers. ('Time' Site to Erect Paywall for Mag-Only Content).

It's likely others will only join the paywall lemming rush when Chairman Rupert's grand experiment with his most prestigious UK brand has played out a little more. Meanwhile, of course the snakes emerge to quibble about the shameless behaviour of some of the brands, now addicted to stealing intellectual property, while righteously demanding people pay for their content.

Cue Roy Greenslade and Memo to Sunday Times: should you charge for editorial taken from a free website? Apparently The Times lifted a story without credit or permission:

"They didn't ask either Geoff or me for permission (which would have been readily forthcoming, of course). They didn't check it in any way, and didn't even wonder whether it might have been a spoof story.

"No matter. It obviously gives us carte blanche to lift at will from The Times and Sunday Times... if only we can get into their site. As we say all too often on our website, it wouldn't have happened in the old days."

Well we don't lift all that story so you can rush off to check the sources. Hey we believe in attribution at the pond. It's only fair when you lift things, unlike for example when the Sydney Morning Herald ripped a Downfall rip, and then blanked out all the naughty words. Shame, Granny, shame.

Yesirree Bob, in a tit for tat world, Chairman Rupert's empire better lift its game or the pirates will make hay, having been shown how to make pirate hay by Chairman Rupert pirates (yes, we're looking at you, The Punch, Australia's most cheapskate half assed conversation, and you, the Daily Terror, shameless pillager of free).

Meanwhile, it's great fun, as a tremor runs though the force, and there's so many on the case, scanning the tea leaves and looking at the runes to work out how it might all work out. And doing it for free ...

Oh perfidious free, and there's Chairman Rupert down to his last few billion ...

Finally, no original work was done in preparing this piece, and it is priced accordingly, but we do urge you to head off to The Guardian and other sites referenced. The poor possums need an upsurge in traffic, and anything we can do to make the advertising and linked in culture work for them is well worth the effort.

And now a final graph, which dimly through the acid flashback, we begin to understand: