Around the Net

Testing The (UK) Times' Paid Model

Across the pond, The Times (UK) and its sister paper The Sunday Times began testing a subscription service two weeks ago. Beehive City -- a blog founded by some former Times reporters earlier this year -- claims to have gotten its hands on some early user-registration data. At least 150,000 people registered for The Times and Sunday Times Web sites during the free trial period, while 15,000 have so far agreed to start paying for the papers' content.

"This [latter] figure, apparently, is considered disappointing," writes the blog. "And if it's right it's certainly a slow start (right now Beehive City considers itself bigger than Times Online, and we ain't lying either)." More promising, 12,500 consumers have already agreed to pay for The Times's separate iPad application. "That's considered to be a very good number -- given that not that many people own an iPad." Moreover, that last number leads Beehive City to believe that the future of newspapers will start to look more like the music business, i.e., "a declining print business; a modestly growing Apple dominated digital-paid for business -- and an Internet free-for-all in which nobody pays for anything that erodes the previous two."

Read the whole story at Beehive City »

Next story loading loading..