The Times and The Sunday Times will start charging for online content later this year. Readers will be offered a week’s subscription for £2, or a day’s access for £1, to two new sites, www.thetimes.co.uk and www.sundaytimes.co.uk. Existing subscribers to the print editions will be given free online access. International pricing has been set at $2/€1.5 a day or $4/€3 for a week. Last August Rupert Murdoch announced plans to charge for all the newspapers’ websites. This move was referred to as a ‘defining moment for journalism..’ presumably because bold steps are required to attempt to reverse what has become the accepted model of free online news and to charge a fee for the ‘value’ it represents.
Times Online — which includes The Times and The Sunday Times — has c. 20 million monthly unique visitors. The print edition of The Times has 1.7 million readers and The Sunday Times has 3.2 million readers.
Newspaper publishers are desperate for new business models to compensate for declining ad revenues. In January The New York Times said that it would charge for access to its website and The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal already have online subscription models. The New York Times plans to introduce a ‘metred’ model where a reader is charged after accessing a set number of free articles every month.
The Guardian said it will not charge for online access while certain papers, such as London's Evening Standard has abandoned readership revenue and made print editions free.
The NYT's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, agreed that the strategy is not without risk: "This is a bet, to a certain degree, in where we think the web is going." But like many newspapers, the New York Times is in the midst of a financial storm. Its parent company, the New York Times Company, owns 15 papers, including the International Herald Tribune and the Boston Globe, and sustained a loss of $70m in the nine months to September last. It recently accepted a $250m loan from Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire, to strenghten its balance sheet.
For publishers, internet charges are a dilemma. Online promotions are likely to fall dramatically with the advent of paid for subscriptions, which may make newspaper websites less appealing to advertisers.
The New York Times has experienced difficulties with paid for online access in the past - some of their well known columnists objected on the grounds that many readers, especially in developing countries, would not be able to afford to read their important content.
Critics, including Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post, believe charges to access online content will not work because there is already so much free content available in cyberspace. She said last year: "Unless you're selling porn, and especially very weird porn‚ online subscriptions are a dead loss."
