The Times Readership Drops With Paywall

Rupert Muroch made a big statement and said that The Times, had to move to a paid-content online subscription system and made the transition. We now read the figure for July from ComScore which shows a 1.2 million user drop for May’s 2.79 million-strong readership, to 1.61 million. More disturbing is the drop in the visitors' average time on the site from 7.6 minutes in May to 4 minutes in July.

News Corp head Rupert Murdoch is quoted "With our paywall around the Times, we have had an encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price,"

However, trends in July impacted the free Telegraph and Guardian who both recording losses of online readership whilst The Mail Online and The Independent, strengthened to 9 million and 3.54 million unique visitors, respectively.

So who is right and who is wrong and who cares? The one thing that is certain is the Murdoch will not admit he was wrong easily . It’s said that obne swallow doesn’t make a summer and it will take more then one readership drop to herald Winter.

More Digital Piracy

Last week we reported on the questionable ebooks for sale on eBay, now today the Times covers similar abuse on Scribd.com ‘Authors fight free books site Scribd for ‘pirating’ their work’ where the paper found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s World without End among many bestselling titles available. The Californian Scribd website claims to be the most popular literary site in the world attracting some 55 million visitors a month.

Scribd operates a ‘notice and takedown system’ under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means that the site is not held liable for actions of its users of which it is not aware. However, are publisher now to employ watchers who sole job is to search and discover infringement and serve notices? Some would say that many already do and their associations are very active but surely the service providers must know that content is illegal or at best dubious. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to spot the questionable items on eBay so why are they allowed to place them?

Everyone’s worst nightmare is that books follow the same route as music and instead of being ripped off the books are merely scanned. Some would argue that by imposing strict DRM you invite the pirates in and others that without DRM you invite the pirates in. What is clear is that digital books are now visible and the cracks unfortunately are starting to appear. We can lock up the digital copy with DRM, embed digital watermarks but the physical copy can be still scanned by increasingly sophisticated scanners. Many of the books that are raising eyebrows are not available today digitally so it’s fair to assume the source is the physical book.