Now here’s a funny one. This afternoon’s session on paid content models for newspaper sites picked out all the usual examples about paid archives and subscriptions that we’ve all heard before – WSJ, FT, TimesSelect, blah blah blah. But Ireland.com was wheeled out afterwards as a case study and it really was quite fascinating, in a peculiar way. GM Una O’Hare said The Irish Times was one of the first newspapers in the world to go online in 1994, and certainly the first in the UK and Ireland. The site made the switch to totally paid-access in 2001 against a background of increasing costs, implosion of the dot com bonanza, financial crisis of the parent company and the virtually non-existent online advertising market in Ireland. Everything but classifieds, add-on services like dating and travel and key index pages were blocked to non subscribers. Their first move towards blocking all this content was by trying out a paid-for email service using the site’s prestigious Ireland.com domain, which they saw as a low risk way of testing the usership’s appetite for paying for content. The 118,000 users of the free email service dropped to 12,000 when the Euro 30 annual charge was introduced. That represented a conversion rate of around 10.5 percent, even though their research estimated 25 percent of users would pay for the service. More research showed that 90 percent of users would not pay for site access “but we went ahead anyway,” said O’Hara, in May 2002. The fallout was page impressions dropping from 25 million to 6.5 million – “quite a dramatic effect” – and she merrily told the audience how rival sites of The Irish Examiner and RTE all quickly “picked up our traffic”. Added to that, the site lost its significant North American readership to the extent that it was selling more online subscriptions in the UK than to the large Irish diaspora in the States. Corporate and institutional subscriptions built up quickly but individual subscriptions were much harder.
And after all that, the site is now concerned with capitalising on the online ad market in Ireland which is finally starting to grow – and that means getting traffic back again. The site needs to rebuild its audience, but has to battle against its reputation as a subscription-only site. It has diversified into health and dating, and is planning web TV, a digitized archive, a redesign, abstracts of paid-for articles and – wait for it – free access to breaking news that all launches in the next fortnight.
So the site lost the very important North American chunk of its readership and gave three quarters of its audience to its rivals – but still isn’t profitable. It’s hard to say whether a free-to-access/audience-building strategy would generate more revenue potential in the long term – but still, what has the site really gained this way? O’Hara said: “In 2001 the advertising market was very flat – we would not have made the same money from advertising, and today the subscription revenue was way in excess of advertising revenue.” Sixty-three percent to 22 percent, in fact. But online advertising is predicted to rise 40 percent, and Ireland.com has a massive struggle to regain audience share in what is now a much busier market.
This article originally appeared in MediaGuardian.
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