Social Media The Key To Success For A Newspaper’s Web Site?

Philip M. Stone November 24, 2010 Follow on Twitter

Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers have taken a look at the pay walls erected around his UK Times and Sunday Times and have basically told the boss, “Thanks, but no thanks.” They’re going to use a more social media-friendly approach.

Not that the Australian newspapers are straying too far off the News Corp. reservation – it’s just that instead of using the UK model they’re going for something more like the Wall Street Journal model where most of the top stories are behind a pay wall, but about 40% or so of content is free. The Australian hope is that the sites can generate lots of social media comment  from those free-access stories.

Richard Freudenstein, CEO of News Digital Media and The Australian newspaper, tried to put it as politely as he could on an Australian TV show. “News Corp. is experimenting with different models around the world. I think we’re quite attracted to The Wall Street Journal model  where you get the benefit of still getting a lot of your advertising revenue combining it with the ability to market yourself to a whole range  of people and then upselling them into the paid part of the site. We think there’s a pretty good model. That’s probably the model we’ll adopt down here.”

And he emphasized that social media activity is vital to any such pay wall model. “A very big part of the way people, particularly young people, consume media is through social and you have to be part of that to be relevant to that audience.” Under the UK model access to the home page is free to all, but to get beyond that home page  means having to pay. And what has that done to The Times?

Interestingly, that question was answered in Australia by none other than Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger who was there giving a lecture on the same night Freudenstein gave his TV interview. News Corp is not a Rusbridger fan because the Guardian editor has continually maintained he believes the free model is the best although he has tempered that over time by saying some pay might work as long as most of a site remains free. In his lecture Rusbridger gave his view of how the Times pay wall has failed:

“I've always argued it's a good thing that different organizations are trying different routes to the future. And the models that are currently emerging are very different. Our web traffic last month averaged just over 2 million unique browsers a day. One independent company which measured the Times' UK web audience during September found that their web traffic – not including iPad apps – had fallen by 98% as people progressed past the pay wall.

“More sophisticated analysts than me calculate that the content behind the pay wall is therefore generating a total global audience of about 54,000 a month, of whom about 28,000 are paying for the digital content (the remainder being print subscribers).

“That's not a criticism of the Times: that path may well make sense for how they see the future. The jury on the relative financial models for different approaches will remain out for a while yet. But these comparative figures point to completely different ideas of scale, reach, audience, engagement, ambition… and of journalism itself.”

In other words, he thinks The Times has it badly wrong. And the Australian branch of the company seems to think so, too. And so does Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, who a few months back called the Times pay wall a “foolish experiment” mainly because the online readership had dropped so dramatically that it diminished the newspaper’s influence in today’s social media digital world.

As an example, he said that in the midst of the BP Gulf crisis he saw former BP chairman Lord Browne at an event and he asked him whether he would have handled the oil spill any differently to the then management and The Times picked up on the question. So an excited Wales later Twittered, “The Times of London is reporting my question to former BP CEO Lord Browne” and he expected the digital world to light up. But lo and behold nothing really happened because when his followers tried to access the story in The Times the pay wall blocked them, and they weren’t about to pay for the privilege. That  had Wales raging, “The Times has made itself irrelevant. It could not be tweeted and it could not be picked up by the blogs. No one is talking about it (The Times). I don’t think it will work.” His final conclusion: “The Times pay wall is anti social-media.”

And that seems to be the perfect example of what the Murdoch Australian newspapers do NOT want happening with their sites. They want people to Twitter about their stories and link them on Facebook pages. They hope the Twitters and all the other links mean more access to those stories and that in turn means more advertising revenue because of more eyes on site. At the same time, it hopes the WSJ model brings in substantial subscription revenue – the best of three worlds.

The WSJ and The Financial Times models are successful, however, because many of their users can expense account the cost for buying in financial information that they claim will help them do their job better. Can general interest newspapers that have plenty of competition out there for the same news be able to successfully climb on that financial news bandwagon?

ftm itself has discovered first-hand how important social media is. There are days when we get more traffic from the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Linkeden than we do from our more traditional accesses. It just takes one social media fan to pick up on something and in no time it seems the whole world is tuning in!

One thing for sure, there are a variety of possible business models to make the Web financially pay off, but no matter what market research says you won’t really find out what works until you try it.

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