News UK, the publisher of The Times, Sunday Times and The Sun, is experimenting with its paywall by making some of its archived content available to non-paying subscribers.
Speaking at the annual Future of Newsbrands event on Monday (19 September), the publisher’s creative content director, Tiffanie Darke, said the business is currently exploring new ways to attract more people to its subscription-only newsbrands.
The Times’ paywall has been effective at monetising its digital content, but it is at odds with the way the Internet currently works by making content easily discoverable and free to access.
“We’re doing it as an experiment to see first of all if it cannibalises our own audience,” Darke said. “Also to see whether we can get an audience in the way that we’re doing it – and what’s the reaction of our paying subscribers to that?”
The Times currently has around 413,600 subscribers across print and digital, with subscribers given full access to its digital content for £1 a week for 12 weeks and £6 thereafter.
However, Darke said that the nature of the paywall means there is a huge amount of content that The Times “could be using better”.
“We’re sitting on such a massive archive that’s doing nothing for us,” Darke said.
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“If you type in ’10 best hotels in Paris’ you’ll get The Telegraph and the Guardian but you won’t get The Times. That’s a missed opportunity because that’s all archived stuff that we’re sitting on that actually we could be using better.”
However, content has to be more than seven days old before it is free to access, meaning paying subscribers still get it under a period of exclusivity.
While a paywall is clearly working well for two of News UK’s titles, Darke said how “massively relieved” The Sun’s editorial teams were to get rid of theirs at the end of last year.
“They hated it; they knew it wouldn’t work because they’re not producing the same sort of content,” she said.
“Of course, why wouldn’t you [try it]? You trust your audience, you know your audience are loyal, you think ‘why wouldn’t they pay for us digitally if they pay for us in print?’ But the truth is that’s just not how audiences behave – certainly not the way The Sun audience behaves.
The Sun’s Dream Team football platform, however, has 1.25 million paying subscribers.
“It depends on the product,” Darke said. “Sun audiences will pay for content if they can’t get it elsewhere.”
