Here’s something to think about. You are Rupert Murdoch and you are erecting a pay wall around The Times in London in the Spring and your unique users take a 5% dive in December to put you 16 million behind the Guardian.
Ouch, I mean really. What else can you say? I don’t know. I have no idea about any of this but I am looking at the figures.
These figures are for December. We might have bought less newspapers but some of us were surfing a great deal more.
The Guardian is up by 3.32% to 36,980,637 million. The Mail Online is also up by even more to 5.1% to 32,843,958.
The Independent was up as well. Wore the Indy, which rose 4.71% to 9,347,658 million, is closing on the Mirror.co.uk. The Mirror dropped 8.73% to 9.7 million uniques. Isn’t that just a little embarrassing? To be more than 10 million behind the Sun Online? The Sun Online rose 3.5% to 20,907,012.
Back to the Guardian and Times Online. There is so much daylight between the two that you could hold a daylight saving convention (do they have those?). It can not be encouraging if you are about to put up a pay wall. I say that as a fan of the paper. I like The Times. I’m a huge fan of David Aranovitch.
The same question must apply to Times Online as it does to the Mirror. What is our closest rival doing so right that it grows and continues to do so and we go in the opposite direction at a faster pace? It is not an isolated fall. Times Online’s unique users fell in November as well down 1.65% year on year to 20.9 million.
So much so that it allows Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger to come out earlier this week and say that Guardian News & Media (which made £25m from online ad revenues in 2009) is putting is faith not in pay walls, but online advertising and free content. It could do that from a position of great strength.
Clearly, there is something to be done at the Times and it knows this. Earlier this week it promoted Daniel Finkelstein to executive editor online. As well as being involved in pay wall plans he will clearly be looking at what it is already doing. Looking at what works and what does not work so well.
He has overseen the paper’s Comment Central operation. Good work too, I would say if Times Online wants to repeat some of the success The Guardian has had in that area it has a way to go yet.
Maybe Finkelstein who is the paper’s former chief leader writer, a one time SDPer and Tory advisor, has some tricks up his sleeve. A drop to less than 20 million uniques says he’ll need them.
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A bad start to his new job for acting editor of the Sunday Times, Martin Ivens. He is to apologise personally to the Board of the Deputies of British Jews after publishing a cartoon that has been branded antisemitic and been disowned by Rupert Murdoch, according to the Guardian.
