The figure also includes Apple iTunes Store App purchases and Kindle subscriptions. But they're not broken down. For all we know 3 people could have bought direct access to the website and the other 99,997 people could have bought the App to read something on their iPhone while taking the train to work.
It's interesting to see that the Guardian are now earning around £40 million from on-line ad revenues. While the back of a napkin calculation by the BBC blogger puts The Times paywall at £7 million.
His figures may not be right though. I've seen other articles quote much lower figures than the £40m - closer to £25m (http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-is-financial-times-the-...). For comparison that article also quotes that at the time the Times was pulling in £15m - £18m from on-line ad revenue.
Part of the reason for the difference is that The Guardian on-line audience is larger and generally more engaged than that of The Times. Part of this is because The Guardian have been very forward thinking by newspaper standards in their use of the web, but it's also because they have a younger more technology aware audience than The Times which tends to be older. There are ways of addressing this (for instance The Daily Mail on-line is a very different beast to it's paper version with a very different audience - one all pictures of pretty ladies in short skirts, the other righteous indignation at such moral outrages as pretty ladies in short skirts) but it's core following was always going to be harder to convert.
Also remember that subscription doesn't mean zero ad revenue. The Financial Times gets just under £30m a year from advertising on-line despite being a subscription only service. Part of that is down to the fact that they appeal to a very specific, target-able demographic but that would also be true of The Times to a lesser degree.
All of this doesn't make what The Times has done right or wrong, I'm just saying it's not as cut and dried as Rory Cellan-Jones implies. It's early days for The Times and I wouldn't write it off quite yet.
P.S. The iPad app is still a subscription as are the Kindle downloads. They're all revenue for the electronic content so I think it's fair to count it.
The Times iPad app is currently free - I think it has been for a while - so it may be that people are downloading it for the 30 day trial, with no intention of continuing when the charge kicks in, so possibly it's not going to be a big revenue generator in terms of subs or advertising.
It may be that these free iPad downloads aren't included in the figure of 105k "sales" - I can't tell from any of the coverage I've seen.
The difference is that the Times and Sunday Times are aimed at the public. There's plenty of competition and free on-line quality alternatives in the UK from the BBC News Website and the Guardian. What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.
I'll bet the type of news you're willing to pay for isn't aimed at the general public. I reckon sites that will do well behind a paywall are either specialist sites or industry specific sites or even sites that offer time sensitive information first. The kind of sites that either offer quality information or hold a monopoly on this information. They also won't price this for the general public they'll price it for the corporations.
>What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.
I can give you a single data point - I used to read The Times online most days, not generally very much. I'd skip to the letters to sample the public mood, pick the top stories and view the World and UK front pages. I have missed it, but I can't afford to pay, i.e. it's not a high enough priority to warrant the money (but I'm an outlier with respect to payment power).
I use Google News now, kinda. It doesn't really hit the mark, I do occasionally look at other papers - Guardian, Telegraph, Mail (rarely), Independent - but generally I'm relying on social sites to get news. I miss The Times, I grew up reading it, but Google News is OK along with one of the other broadsheets.
The BBC bias always annoys me. I expect commercial interests to have, well, commercial interests but somehow the BBC never really hits the mark. I do read news there about once a fortnight and find their news reviews to be very thorough.
>What I'm interested to see is how other sites traffic went up as people left the Times site as the pay wall was put up.
I can give you a single data point - I used to read The Times online most days, not generally very much. I'd skip to the letters to sample the public mood, pick the top stories and view the World and UK front pages. I have missed it, but I can't afford to pay, i.e. it's not a high enough priority to warrant the money (but I'm an outlier with respect to payment power).
I use Google News now, kinda. It doesn't really hit the mark, I do occasionally look at other papers - Guardian, Telegraph, Mail (rarely), Independent - but generally I'm relying on social sites to get news. I miss The Times, I grew up reading it, but Google News is OK along with one of the other broadsheets.
Somehow the BBC never really hits the mark, I find their bias a bit annoying too. I do read news there about once a fortnight and find their news reviews to be very thorough.
That's just hearsay. It's pretty hard to believe in the days of Pantone that two high-scale vendors cannot match colors.
There were also rumors that it had something to do with light and the camera (iow, white doesnt absorb light as well). Who knows?
Although I use their gear, I'm not known to say a lot of nice things about Apple, but I think this "fiasco" isn't. I applaud them for their apparent eye for QA in the matter.
These sorts of QA blunders are virtually routine for competitors like HTC, Motorola, and Samsung.
It sounds like Jobs announced the white iPhone 4 a bit too prematurely. Lesson learned, let's ditch the White i4 and move onto the next thing.
I've heard that too, but it's just hard to believe that a company that can pack so much stuff in such small spaces (be it iOS devices or MacBook Air's) and is praised for its industrial design and great hardware engineering, can't figure out suppliers to have matching colors for a button.
(note: I'm not saying that's not the case, it's just surprising)
I love this quote -
"We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the perception."
It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.
Chess champions use this technique too. I remember seeing a TV documentary where they got a chess champion to look at a board layout for a few seconds and reproduce it in front of them. They could do this easily for a valid board layout. But when they got people with no knowledge of chess to design the board layout in an invalid manner the chess champion could not reconstruct the board as accurately or as quickly.
I guess a common programming equivalent would be a design pattern.
I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.
A/B test with red - I'll bet you a drink red outperforms green. (Oh, and make sure your conversion isn't clicks, but purchases. I believe the Associates API will let you track by click. And, no Pek, we don't do that tracking at Dawdle. :( )
TweetDeck on iPhone is the same.
The multi account feature was what won me over in the first place. I liked it as I could use it for managing both my personal and websites twitter account. Unfortunately that's broken right now. The issue is mentioned on their support forums, but no one at TweetDeck seem to have picked up.
The only other issue I have is a minor UI gripe. When you click on the run in background button, the progress bar and cancel button for the background tweet covers the back button on the main part of the app. It’s odd that they did that.
