It is still unclear whether News International's paywall for The Times' and Sunday Times' is "working," as the paywall is just two months old, and the websites have not yet made statistics public. In the Independent today, the tagline for Ian Burrell's article on Rupert Murdoch's much discussed paywall states: "advertisers don't like it. Analysts are unconvinced. The paywall at News International may not be winning many fans, but the man behind it is determined to keep it standing." But François Nel, director of the Journalism Leaders Programme at the University of Central Lancashire's School of Journalism, Media and Communication in the United Kingdom, and also an SFN research partner, crunched the numbers, and the result is that the paywalls may be doing better than most people think. A lot better. ]]>
So, as Nel elaborates with his "back-of-the-envelope calculations":
"That would be 20,406,420 X 0.20p =£4,081,284£408,128.40 per month.
So, say they lost 90 per cent of their users and, say, 50 per cent of their advertisers got cold feet, too:
20,040,642 X 0.10 = 2,040,642 users X (0.20p/2=)0.10p= £204,064.20 per month, mostly from advertising.
And say half those users cross the TimesPlus 'paywall' by through the £1 daily access fee and the other half opt for the £2 weekly access.
Income from daily access users: 1,020,642 X £1 x 30 days per month = £33,060, 963 per month.
Income from weekly access users: 1,020,642 X £2 X 4 weeks per month = £8,165, 136 per month
Total income would be £204,064.20 + £33,060, 963 + £8,165, 136 would be : £41,430,163.20, which is still more than 10 times what the income may have been before the paywall.
And say I'm only half right?
Well, then The Times' income would still be up by 500%, rather than 1,000%."
paidContent's Robert Andrews pointed out last month that before calling The Times' and Sunday Times' paywalls successful, "one must properly define what 'success' would be for the project... This is about living within their means, courting their existing readerships to stem big losses..."
Andrews did the math, and after calculating revenue from the number of people surveyed who said they would be likely to pay, found that the publications would make £3.6 million per month, or £43.29 million a year.
"This would make The Times and Sunday Times amongst the world's most successful paid news sites - perhaps more so than FT.com, whose approximately 126,000 subscribers, paying up to £5.49 a week, we estimate make FT Group £35.9 million a year... even assuming a half or quarter of this estimation, Times Newspapers will have brought in something to offset its losses."
Meanwhile, George Brock, head of journalism at London's City University, former executive at The Times and board member of the World Editors Forum (of which this blog is a partner site), told Burrell that the trend is moving toward paywalls, not against them, and that advertising executives need to learn how to work with them. He also said he believes the media conglomerate will stick with the paywall model. "It's a long slog, but I don't detect any signs of [News International] being massively ruffled by the process."
For a previous article related to this topic, visit our sister publication, editorsweblog.org.
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Starting today, one of Brazil's oldest newspapers will be available online-only. Due to mounting debts and low circulation, the Jornal do Brasil has stopped publishing a print version, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas reported.
The UK-based Advertising Standards Authority will be expanding control to corporate websites, social networks and mobile applications from March 2011, the Financial Times reports. The ASA will have the right to ask that paid-for links leading to banned ads be removed and will be able to include ads announcing that certain advertisers are not complying with regulations, according to MediaGuardian. 
