Newspaper paywalls
Murdoch’s Times has ~50,000 online pay subscribers. The Guardian has 37 million readers. Interestingly the Times paywall seems to have decreased the number of print subscribers, something Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger didn’t predict:
Well that’s the strange thing that no-one really foresaw coming. I mean I thought that if you switched off other, all other forms of getting The Times and Sunday Times digitally that the print sales would go up but it turns out that in fact The Times figures are sliding faster than anybody else in the quality market, which suggests to me that we overlook the degree to which the digital forms of our journalism act as a kind of sort of marketing device for the newspapers. And that if you put a gigantic wall around your content and disappear from the general chatter and conversation about your content then people forget to buy the paper as well. So it’s a kind of double whammy.