psmith, journalist

Update 1/7/10: See Tom Whitwell’s comment below: he points out that of course there are adverts on thetimes.co.uk, “on every page” even. “We just don’t have dozens of flashing popup/popunder ads for Albanian bingo parlours,” he says.

So I admit to exaggerating slightly by saying there are “no” adverts – but one or two display boxes on a page is a real contrast from most online newspapers and I think my general point stands: one of the selling points of the Times online is to not have your attention diverted by garish Flash animations and gaudy rollovers.

Original: If we boil this paid content debate to its essence, it comes to this:

1. People either pay to read and watch stuff you make
2. Or they don’t.

You either want people to support your editorial costs through direct payments, or you think the advertising economy online will be enough.

On one hand, digital ad spend will soon reach £3.79 billion a year in the UK, overtaking TV and print, according to an eMarketer survey of analysts’ ad projections so there unquestionably is some business model to be constructed from ad-based media (not all analysts are as optimistic incidentally, though most agree online is returning to growth after some stagnation).

At the same time, there is unquestionably a business model behind paid: as the b2b sector has consistently shown, timely, important, need-to-know information sells online very heathily. The question remains, as The Times plugs away marketing its soon-to-be paid-for thetimes.co.uk, can consumer newspaper content succeed behind the paywall?

Here there’s two points: one, it depends how you define that success and two, paid content has an advantage in offering quality stuff that comes uninterrupted and separate from commercial interests.

Paywall bar of success lower than you’d think…

Times Newspapers, wisely, is not putting a target figure on how many of its 1.2 million daily unique users (20.4 million a month) it hopes to convert to paying customers, nor how many new users might be tempted to sign up for the paid Sunday times site. A much-quoted survey from paidContent:UK (from September, when I still worked there) found that only five percent of online newspaper readers would pay to read the same sites.

At news:rewired on Friday, Times assistant editor and head of online Tom Whitwell told me his reaction to this and similar surveys was not at all down-hearted: a five percent conversion rate, which would in theory give the site more than one million paying customers, would not be considered a bad result at all. To put that in context, at £2 a week, one million readers would bring in £106 million in revenue.

So he must be pleased as punch that the latest paidContent:UK / Harris Interactive survey found that as many as a quarter of free Times Online readers will go over the the paid-for thetimes.co.uk. As Whitwell put it: “If we had believed that all of our free customers will transfer to paid customers, we would make £2 billion. We’re not expecting to make £2 billion.”

Whitwell may have said the whole project was a “leap in the dark”, but I sense a lot of optimism from Wapping on this. Here’s my short Audioboo interview with Whitwell:

Would you pay to get rid of ads? Not if they’re good ones

When thetimes.co.uk was finally revealed after more than a year in development, everyone commented – either as a compliment or backhanded put-down – that it “looks like a newspaper”. That it does, but with one major difference: there are no adverts there are hardly any adverts (see Whitwell’s comment below: he points out there are ads on every page). Tellingly, Whitwell told news:rewired that The Times had considered all manner of commercial options short of charging readers: display ads, SEO pimping, commercial tie-ins and sponsorships, audio/visual flash-based ads — essentiall what he called “enormously intrusive advertising”.

Although online advertising spend is rising, having no ads or interruptions is a major selling point. How many times has your reading concentration been shattered by a rollover ad or pointless audio installation flogging some Hollywood film involving robots hitting each other?

I’m a fan of what Mirror Group Newspapers is doing: breaking out Mirror.co.uk niches like football and celeb gossip and building targeted advertising and commercial relationships with big brands. Instead of SEO and mass reach, relevance and loyal audiences.

You could perhaps accuse the Mirror of being guilty of what Whitwell might call intrusion: there no shortage of flashy display ads vying for the reader’s eye on these sites. But there’s more to it than that: check out MirrorFootball’s clever tie-in with Sega, who publish the Football Manager video game, (one of the most successful and addictive PC games of all time). The game’s creator blogs about players to watch during the World Cup that virtual managers can then buy for their team in the game; the site offered a free demo download of the latest version of the game last year.

As Ilicco Elia from Reuters pointed out to me while I was writing this, if it’s not annoying and is relevent it stops being advertising and simply becomes content. This is the kind of thing footy fans like reading – many of them wouldn’t consider this advertising at all and that’s the key.

So as publishers fight for a bigger slice of that slowly expanding online advertising pie, using ever louder, brasher techniques to disrupt readers’ experience,  The Times’ purist approach could just pay off. For everyone else,  the mission has to be to work with the ad industry to create targeteds words and pictures that readers want to see.

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• Times confident of success in ‘leap in the dark’ paywall plan (guardian.co.uk)
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pic credit: Lori Spindler, via Flickr