What do the News International paywall figures mean? That's the question we have been asking ever since the numbers were released at 7am yesterday.
There has been some bizarre reportage, none more baffling than the Reuters report headlined Times loses less than 90 percent of readers online. Eh?
Good to see that the Sky News website asserted its independence from its News Corporation overlords by headlining its report, The Times reveals sharp fall in web audience.
Most of the commentary has been about the problem of understanding what the figures mean, as a Financial Times report, Experts doubt Times paywall data, noted.
I liked the description of the numbers by Tim Glanfield, on Beehive City. He called them "fluffy", and, after trying to make sense of them, he complained: "My head hurts."
George Brock, head of City University London's journalism department, was distinctly unimpressed with the News Int's release of "sales" figures for The Times and Sunday Times websites.
"Any business journalist on either title confronted with this sort of chicanery from another company in the online market would gleefully rip into the executives releasing numbers in such opaque form."
There were some good attempts to get at the truth. Best of the bunch: Robert Andrews here and Dan Sabbagh here. See also an apposite comment from Adam Tinworth.
I also commend the obligatory Times paywall post by Fleet Street Blues
who takes us all to task for making "back-of-the-envelope calculations".
So, rather than joining in with the speculation, and refusing to be negative, the blog argues that "getting people to pay for news online is at this stage still more of a philosophical adventure than a business proposition", and concludes:
"We're kind of impressed that 105,000 people have been persuaded to part with any money at all for something they can get in pretty similar form for free elsewhere."
It isn't 105,000 people of course (see Tinworth). But it's a fair point.
