Ireland.com - will you pay?

jmcc

Originally posted by lara


Actually, there is a good bit of analysis, special reports, etc that you can get on Ireland.com that you can't get from the paper edition.

Not on that apparent on the technology subsite the last time I read it. It basically is a bish-bosh job of the paper articles with syndicated pieces from the AP or FT. The problem with such subsites is that the level of knowledge required to provide a decent analysis article is often beyond the average journo. Despite the audience being generally non-specialist, the problem of better articles being available for free elsewhere is fatal for the subsite.

ireland.com was always intended to be a long term investment for the company, so I don't think they would have been too surprised to find it was making a loss.

It looked more like vanity publishing to me. There did not seem to be any coherent business plan for ireland.com. More importantly the way that the subsites developed seemed to indicate people playing at being publishers rather than publishers planning a publication.

But I would hate to see them kill off the site by trying to implement a PPV model that people won't accept. Until other Irish websites, such as Unison and examiner.ie do the same, Ireland.com may find their online readership seriously declines after they begin charging for content.

In publishing, if something is not viable then you have to kill it off or it will be a drain on your organisation. Any attempt to impose PPV will result in a loss of readers. However the hardcore attitude is that these readers were not paying anyway so it means reduced hosting costs for the website. However the management of ireland.com does not seem to understand the problems of PPV models (a subject that apparently I am an expert on from a previous life ). The technology subsite is clearly not worth paying for when you can get the same grade information from other free sources. It has to compete with techcentral.ie and enn.ie locally. The business subsite is in a similar situation.

Without PPV ireland.com was cannibalising the IT. This kind of problem frequently occurs when a paper publication tries to implement a free web edition. The whole concept of web publishing is that the ancilliary services often make more money than the web edition of the publication. From the way the management of the IT is acting, it seems that it does not understand the situation. The decision to separate ireland.com e-mail and ireland.com access was a very stupid one and very bad salesmanship. (But that is a different thread and I have not had my morning coffee yet [currently at T+12 Hours due to implementing Ireland's first Free Open Directory Project site]).

Regards...jmcc

lara

Originally posted by jmcc


Not on that apparent on the technology subsite the last time I read it.

The standard of technology reporting may not exactly be top notch, but Ireland.com is, thankfully for the site's sake at least, more than a technology subsite.

It looked more like vanity publishing to me. There did not seem to be any coherent business plan for ireland.com. More importantly the way that the subsites developed seemed to indicate people playing at being publishers rather than publishers planning a publication.

Perhaps as one of Ireland's leading newspapers it was felt that it should have a site. At least if people are reading it for free online, they are still reading it - it has a profile in other countries besides Ireland, the UK and the US. I can understand why they would go down that line

In publishing, if something is not viable then you have to kill it off or it will be a drain on your organisation.

Ireland.com is a drain on the company's resources, but when you consider that this particular company had, until recently, an estimated £50 million in reserves, the figure doesn't seem quite so bad. The feedback about the redundancies in the IT and Ireland.com all indicated that this loss was expected, and like many other online publications, they eventually wanted to make a profit.

And regarding the syndicated pieces from AP, Reuters and FT, these are often cheaper to use than employing a freelancer to do the work for them - expenses, fees etc all add up.:)

Beastie Boy

They would really have to improve the overall service for me to pay- I used to use their e-mail but gave it up becuase of the poor service and poor interface-

As for other news stuff- Its generally very good but I think if faced with the option I still think I would buy the hard copy.

I know a civil servant friend of mine in the Dept. of Education who uses it all the time- I wonder will certain state agencies pay for it or negotiaite a discount- The archcives and the "Breaking News" services are a very popular and relevant news source.

jmcc

Originally posted by lara


The standard of technology reporting may not exactly be top notch, but Ireland.com is, thankfully for the site's sake at least, more than a technology subsite.

Yep I noticed that when I saw the Net Results article today. A terrabit stream is not a million bits per second and the top Irish speed is not four million times less than a million bits per second but sometimes it does feel like it. (Kilo,Mega,Giga,Terra) It was an Op-Ed piece so the precise technicalities are often not as important as the viewpoint to the general reader.

Perhaps as one of Ireland's leading newspapers it was felt that it should have a site.

It still sounds like the old dotbomb thinking - doing it because they think people expect them to do it. This kind of thinking led to many of the dotcom fiascos in that nobody stopped to check if there was a way that the process could be made to pay.

The site is more a constellation of smaller niche sites rather than one coherent multi-sectioned site.

Along the way, the far stronger brand of the Irish Times was sucked into ireland.com. From a marketing point of view, it is difficult to separate the two now. When the announcements about PPV were made, it seemed as if people could not separate ireland.com from the Irish Times nor from the subsites. This is a critical difference between the FT and the WSJ and the Irish Times. The FT and the WSJ have coherent brands whereas the Irish Times is either part of Ireland.com or is Ireland.com or is running an e-mail service.

Ireland.com is a drain on the company's resources, but when you consider that this particular company had, until recently, an estimated £50 million in reserves, the figure doesn't seem quite so bad.

Somehow that quote from Dickens (I think) springs to mind here. The shillings and pence still confuse me but the idea that a loss is still a loss is clear.

like many other online publications, they eventually wanted to make a profit.

That is the problem for Ireland.com. The management may not actually be up to the task. Basically it is cargo-culting along following the FT/WSJ and other international papers.

The big mistake that the management made was to split the e-mail and potential subscription base. It is far easier to sell the two together. Of course there may be a lot of pressure on the present management for results.

And regarding the syndicated pieces from AP, Reuters and FT, these are often cheaper to use than employing a freelancer to do the work for them - expenses, fees etc all add up.:)

Yep normally if you can't sell advertising space, you pad with agency stuff.

Most freelancers have no editorial experience or indeed experience of running a publication. As a result, they don't see the hit coming when the publication changes policy. Somehow I think that Ireland.com will have to slash and burn if it wants to remain viable. What amazes me is that it still has the Friday * In Business section running still. A more logical solution would be to syndicate articles from ENN. Its big mistake was to kill off Computimes.

The market for good tech journalism was largely destroyed by the press release recyclers. Some of these people even worked for WebIreland when all the higher profile journos had stopped writing for it. But then the last 'editor' of that rag was adept at recycling - he even tried to recycle one of my articles as his own. Maybe I should get a job writing press releases.

Regards...jmcc

shotamoose

What puzzles me about ireland.com's transition to pay-email is that they went with such a clearly inferior product. Their new email service, in the 'trial period' before I actually had to start paying for it and thus stopped using it, was awful - nasty blocky design, bug-riddled processes, and most bizarre of all they sold advertising space on their 'error' pages...
Why didn't they just use IMP or some other free, stable and usable email service? I presume they paid this Outblaze crowd quite a sum.
And at the moment, the breaking news service is similarly riddled with bugs - I tried to access three stories from the main page yesterday; one got an 'access forbidden' page, another threw up some mangled html code on screen, and the last sent me to the wrong story.
Get it together lads... :rolleyes:

lara

Yep normally if you can't sell advertising space, you pad with agency stuff

Not wanting to get off topic but.... I'll have to disagree with you on that point. It's not to do with filling advertising space - it's becausew they don't have the resources. If you take a look at the paper, the majority the agency news is used in the foreign news section - this is more to do with not having the cash to support foerigne correspondents in every country. The technology section - well that's a bone of contention with many people I guess. Again it would come down to resources - if they don't have the expertise to cover the topics, they would rely on AP or reuters to fill in.

Advertising space dictates the number of pages in the paper. When the downturn hit, the property section was downsized from two sections to one (although it was mainly an advertising section anyway). It's the same with magazines - when advertising revenues slump the magazines get thinner.

Its big mistake was to kill off Computimes

I agree with you here, but I think its biggest mistake was to kill off Computimes and not replace it with an improved version. It may not have been the best section of the paper, but it did its job. They should have introduced some sort of technology section for the paper to take its place.
But then, that's just my opinion. Obviously, I have no sway with the IT board of management.

Neil3030

Voted no. Quite happy with free Hotmail (at least 4 the time being)

Fooger

I couldn’t disagree more with the whole notion of pay-for-my-Degree/Super Brain-Analysis.

Worse of all we are dealing with current affairs, the minute you become a select group (those who pay) what will they do ??? give you new luxury news and for love of god there is no way I am paying for some one else’s opinion /analysis I’ve got my own.

As for the other services which my be useful it is subject to the chicken and egg problem of how do people know if they are going to want the extra articles/emails if they are not on the service? They won’t know what they are missing unless you show them the article and then it is no longer selective. It may be a great service but the whole idea is unfeasible.

I have repeatedly read the words in the papers “the market place has to understand” or “once the market place realises”. You react to the market place NOT the market place reacting to you.

trap4

<i>"The problem in this case is that I believe Mangan is jumping the middle ground and trying to do it all at once, and I firmly believe that it won't work. I think there has to be stopgaps on the approach. Mangan should have taken the Salon approach and moved into the paid arena slowly."</i>

I agree fully with you dahamsta. You were also spot on with, <i>"Invest the bare minimum. Take your time. Make a little money, set it aside, and build yourself up out of it. It doesn't have to happen overnight, and it's very unlikely that it will."</i>

Yes, it does take time, and lots of it. We started http://www.GlobalGreyhounds.com 17 months ago (after running it as a Yahoo! Club for 2 years previously). If we'd required paid membership near the beginning we'd have been laughed out of it! But we did introduce a value added GOLD membership option in August of last year and it's been going very well. We took nothing away from free members - they can still access all the areas of the site they could previously, and they can still access to all the features they had when they joined. But what we did do was to create a private value added section to the site, with exclusive new features, which is only accessible to our premier/Gold members. We will continue in this vein, only adding minor features for our free members while continually making the paid option more attractive.

It hasn't happened over night but it is working - a large percentage of our active members have paid up for the extra benefits. I think the important thing to note is that we didn't at any stage 'threaten' our members with ultimatums about having to pay up for access to what was always free. Instead we concentrated on adding value, and let our members make up their own minds about whether or not that 'value' was worth the price we put on it. I would caution anyone with a content based website against pulling the plug on previously free material/features. This greatly alienates your audience and anyway, free sections will always be required as a 'carrot' to attract and interest new visitors."

By the way, two excellent resources for anyone interested in following developments in the transition from fRee to fee are - www.TheEndOfFree.com and www.Bourland.com. In fact last week's Bourland newsletter included a long submission from a guy named Roger Plothow of Idaho Falls, Idaho. The article addressed how local newspapers can develop viable business models on the internet, but the powerful ideas he presented apply to all content sites and the IT! I'll quote a small excerpt from it below, but I would encourage you to go check out the full article -

<i>"Newspapers are engaged in the single largest act of self-destruction in the storied history of our industry.

Since the early 1990s, by misreading the impact of the Internet, byaccepting as fact myths since debunked, newspapers have been engaged in devaluing their most valuable asset - local news content - with potentially cataclysmic results.

The genie is well out of bottle, but it's not too late to lasso it back
home. To do it will take courage and unblinking commitment to a single, simple principle - value.

I'm not talking here about ethical values, human values or even
journalistic values. I'm talking about the value of something as
determined by the price consumers pay for it, a principle older than Adam Smith.

Many of you are already jumping ahead of me - consumers simply will not pay for content online, thereby placing its direct value (not subsidized by advertising) at zero, you are thinking. You'll use research studies, actual experience or water cooler conversations to bolster this argument. My response is pretty simple - <b>the experiment is flawed because the laboratory has been contaminated. The main contaminant is a decade-long online free-for-all based on the most damaging myth to emerge in the digital era - that the Internet changes everything. It doesn't.</b>

When newspapers rushed to push their content online for free - out offear, excitement, greed, whatever - we set an unreasonable expectation that high-quality content can be made available for free in perpetuity, a phenomenon that former New York Times Editor Max Frankel dubbed "Nirvana News." What we're either learning now or will learn eventually is that somebody's got to pay for it.

Frankel put it this way: "The oft-heard promise of ‘free news' is an
oxymoron. Americans will get the journalism they pay for."</i>

~~~~~~~~~
-EirePreneur
http://www.EirePreneur.com

b20uvkft6m5xwg

Originally posted by trap4
Since the early 1990s, by misreading the impact of the Internet, byaccepting as fact myths since debunked, newspapers have been engaged in devaluing their most valuable asset - local news content - with potentially cataclysmic results.

Agreed, I would cite that as my main reason for not subscribing in its current form. It's also something RTE could learn from. I would love to see the affiliate system like in the US and the uk at the end of news bulletins.

Originally posted by trap4
Frankel put it this way: "The oft-heard promise of ‘free news' is an oxymoron. Americans will get the journalism they pay for."

Agreed also. My parents are living in NYC at the moment and thats all I'm hearing about !

trap4

Now this is what Ireland.com should be using for their email. OddPost is one of the most amazing things I've seen on the net in years! People are raving about it, and the creators justifiably IMHO call it, "indubitably the most astounding Web-based e-mail application on earth." More in this wired.com article. And Julian Harris said, "Oddpost is the first practical online web application with a desktop-quality user experience."

~~~~~~~~
-EirePreneur
www.EirePreneur.com

trap4

By the way, I've signed up for the free trial of their USD$30 per year service and can verify that all the hype is justified. The OddPost interface loads lightening fast and you really do forget you're using an in-browser application! Superb:cool:

~~~~~~~~
-EirePreneur
www.EirePreneur.com

b20uvkft6m5xwg

That is impressive I must say !

Obviously, given the choice I use Outlook, but when I'm in college or accessing stuff from work, the Webmail interface I use is pretty poor-

I think if more Webmail interfaces used Frames, like in the mock Outlook style of Oddpost we'd all be better off

apiou

I would not pay Euro 100 per year. If I paid for all the papers I look at on the Net I would need to be a multi MMMMM £££ and i aint. I would probably pay a small fee but no way that. For My Economist I usually pay between 50 and 60 IR£.

There is one last thing - there is a big difference between reading a paper on the net and reading it for real. With the net I only read what is necessary but do not enjoy it. When I go out of my way (I live in Paris) and go down town to get my newspaper I enjoy reading it. Not so over the net.

dahamsta

I hadn't noticed the poll in a while actually. Although they certainly don't speak for the entire Internet community, they seem to speak volumes for the connected Irish users. 46 to 5? Ye gods! There's a lot to be said for targetting your audience correctly.

adam

sceptre

Originally posted by apiou
There is one last thing - there is a big difference between reading a paper on the net and reading it for real. With the net I only read what is necessary but do not enjoy it. When I go out of my way (I live in Paris) and go down town to get my newspaper I enjoy reading it. Not so over the net.

I find the same thing. I know I usually read quickly but reading the ireland.com page, for example, I barely scan the page, opening stories in new windows like there's no tomorrow and just speed-reading those.

Reading a newspaper now, that I enjoy.

dahamsta

I'd be different, but I was never really into newspapers. In fact, if anything, it was the Internet that created my love of "being in the know". The only periodical I spend any time with is The Phoenix. Now that is an enjoyable session. I just wish they'd put the archives on the web (I even offered!).

adam

Victor

At least Phoenix has always linked its stories back to previous stories on the subject. This makes it a good paper resource. I think they may be at a stage where they will have to make a internet move or stay in a declining niche.

dahamsta

The Phoenix has always struck me as a perfect setup for paid-for content, precisely because of the linkage you mention -- the paths that The Phoenix creates between articles are very reminiscent of the web. To be sure, it's an opinionated rag to most, but it does cite facts in stories, facts which could be very useful - or even entertaining - to some. Not only that, but The Phoenix's attention to detail with research - particularly with regard to company details, and the links between them - put them in an ideal position to create value-added services for their users.

For example, if they put their mind to it - and the minds of a few clever techies - they could put CRO records online in direct competition with the organisations already doing it, and link to stories on same. This would eat the current organisations alive, because not only would users be able to research factual information about companies, they would also be able to reseach what other companies they are linked to, and check what The Phoenix has to say about them too. Whether they choose to believe The Phoenix or not would be their problem.

I genuinely believe it's a missed opportunity though, because it's one of the very few examples I can think of where the web could generate more profits for the company than the current bricks-and-mortar setup. They could go subscription-based right from the get-go, giving people access to the previous weeks issue for free, or even just selected articles from the previous week. The current week and all archive material would be subscription based, as well as any other services they add later.

Of course the usual argument about something like this is setup costs, but that's just a matter of building it up slowly, as I've mentioned previously. They could start with a dedicated server in the States and start inputting information week-to-week. When the system start to settle, they could pay data-entry lackies to start inputting archive material. Company information can be retrieved direct from the CRO in electronic format, so that's just a matter of writing an interface, and tying into the stock exchanges is even simpler.

I've even emailed Goldhawk about this, but to no avail. So if anyone on Business/Economy has the ear of Goldhawk, perhaps you might ask him/her/it to give me a tinkle...

adam

The Cigarette Smoking Man

Ireland.com prices are out. Starts June 1st:

Annual: 79 Euro
Monthly: 14 Euro
Weekly: 7 Euro

http://www.ireland.com/premium/promotions/subscription.htm

jmcc

Originally posted by The Cigarette Smoking Man
Ireland.com prices are out. Starts June 1st:

Annual: 79 Euro
Monthly: 14 Euro
Weekly: 7 Euro

http://www.ireland.com/premium/promotions/subscription.htm

I can think of one question about this immediately: Is this a VAT inclusive price? The Revenue Commissioners probably would consider it as service and thus it would be VAT liable.

Regards...jmcc

tHE vAGGABOND

As an Irish person who lives abroad I will be paying as Ireland.com. It, and eamon dunphy, are the only sources of critical views of Irish life/politics that I read to keep up with things. The indo's website is a load of smelly pants, with very little decent content as far as I can see.

From looking at the polls every day I would presume they are relying on people like me, ex-pat's as it were, as when you look at the people who comment it’s like Paddy Murphy from Outer Mongolia. All the staff of the Irish bars around the world I suppose

I know Irish friends of mine in the US read the site just as I do, for a critical view of home. Speak to them on email since the bad news they too would not bat an eyelid to paying €70 (or whatever it really is) for the news for a year.

People don’t have a right for everything for free forever on the internet. Jurno's are paid to write that stuff. If I enjoy reading it then I have no problem paying for it. Just as if I was buying the paper for a quid in my local shop if I was at home.

I do know of some contractors working with Ireland.com to improve both their content and the other services ala yahoo, so they are not going to charge you and not change anything...

Victor

Originally posted by jmcc
I can think of one question about this immediately: Is this a VAT inclusive price? The Revenue Commissioners probably would consider it as service and thus it would be VAT liable.

It would be VAT exclusive, but they will absorb the VAT for Irish customers (how does one prove who the Irish customers are / are not).

jmcc

Originally posted by Victor

It would be VAT exclusive, but they will absorb the VAT for Irish customers (how does one prove who the Irish customers are / are not).

VAT Inclusive for Irish users and for EU users without a VAT number. (If you can quote your EU VAT number when ordering from elsewhere in the EU, you don't have to pay the local VAT. ). I cannot remember the difference between the newspaper rates (I think it is 21% like the magazines though I could be wrong on this) but the service rate would be lower if the Revenue would consider it as a service rather than as a product like software.

I thought that the flamegrilling that Ireland.com's PPV decision got here was bad - but it was nothing like the stuff on the IT's own site. The count stopped at 16% pro pay and 84% against. The feedback on the IT's own forum has more negative comments and most of them seem to be from that key demographic - the expats/foreign readers. While estimates of the IT's e-mail subscriber figure varies between 10000 users and 19000 users, I would not like to even guess at what figure IT will end up with after June.

I always thought that the IT were a bunch of idiots to put someone like Mangan (who has absolutely no experience in running a successful (or otherwise) publishing operation to my knowledge) in charge of Ireland.com just because she was temporarily in charge of IOL and of Buyandsell.net.

The attitudes and instincts of a publisher are totally different to those of a dotbomb manager. (Lara may disagree with me on this ) Ireland.com is in very deep sh1te at the moment and the last thing it needs are a bunch of cargo-cult types trying to ape the FT or NYT. The same mentality that wrecked its technology section is at work again. You don't get someone who only knows how to apply a bandaid to do neurosurgery.

Ireland.com was never a viable business in the form it existed in for the last few years and the people running it did not seem to treat it as a business. I really found the idea that it would include the technology section in the PPV group as that site is as bad as the Irish Times totally useless and forgettable web directory. (A dodgy little number that is basically a Kogan-Page schlock job with minor local mods to make it appear to be Irish - hell many of the sites didn't exist when the first edition was out. The 'authors' probably never even bothered to check the sites they had included).

I don't think that the Indo's site will be able to cope with the number of new users it will get after 20020601. The Examiner will probably get a lot more traffic as well.

Regards...jmcc

Originally posted by jmcc
The problem Victor is that what Mangan and the Irish Times management perceive as being premium is at odds with reality. And there is a lot of non-uniquely sourced material there that can be obtained elsewhere on the web for free.

Thats my thinking on it,anything like this available elsewhere for free means I will not pay for it.
mm

dahamsta

HUPYA!

Ireland.com claims success in paid model

Mangan declined to say how many consumers and businesses had signed for Ireland.com's paid e-mail service. She also said company policy forbade her from saying how many early subscribers there were to Ireland.com's paid content section. "What I can say is we are very pleased with the individual sign-ups so far," Mangan said.

"It's successful because we say it's successful"? Bit of a spurious claim, innit? I wonder to myself if this came from a press release in a desperate attempt to... nah, things couldn't be that bad. Could they?

adam

jmcc

Originally posted by dahamsta
HUPYA!

Ireland.com claims success in paid model

"It's successful because we say it's successful"? Bit of a spurious claim, innit? I wonder to myself if this came from a press release in a desperate attempt to... nah, things couldn't be that bad. Could they?

Not sure which is the most far fetched idea there Adam. Ireland.com issuing a press release claiming that things are fine or ENN recycling a press release as news?

I think that Ireland.com's e-mail escapade left them with considerably less users but it is outsourced. A bit of digging could probably narrow down the supplier and the costs but I doubt if it is making a NET profit.

As for the ENN article it is just a press release bishbosh from about two press releases. What would be amazing would be to see some real journalism on that site. As a press release recycler, it is a classic target for Ireland.com as the PR people know that there will be absolutely no questioning of or verification of a press release there. The content-free nature (no stats) of the Ireland.com claims would lead one to think that Ireland.com really is in trouble.

This is one of the best quotes: 'Mangan declined to say how many consumers and businesses had signed for Ireland.com's paid e-mail service. She also said company policy forbade her from saying how many early subscribers there were to Ireland.com's paid content section. "What I can say is we are very pleased with the individual sign-ups so far," Mangan said.'

Translation: Not that many. Certainly not as many as the e-mail service. Should I start dusting off my CV now?

I think that a complete ignorance of PPV models has landed Ireland.com in a very tricky position. It would have been far more efficient to have implemented a tiered access model rather than the solution they chose.

From a branding point of view, it looks like Ireland.com has failed to differentiate Ireland.com from Irish Times. This has effectively crippled Ireland.com as a worthwhile brand and reduced it to just another dotbomb failure. From a marketing point of view, when people mention Ireland.com now, the PPV aspect will immediately spring to mind. The knock-on effect for the other non-pay sites could be fatal. Well at least their hosting costs should fall.

Regards...jmcc