Stowe Boyd

Two months after Rupert Murdoch’s decision to erect a subscription paywall around the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times, thus removing their content from search engines, the bold experiment is having a marked effect on the rest of British media. There are many who still wish the 79-year-old mogul well, hopeful that he is at the vanguard of a cultural shift that will save newspapers. Yet elsewhere there is dismay among analysts, advertisers, publicists and even some reporters on the papers.

Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.” Lynam says he has been told by News International insiders that traffic to The Times site has fallen by 90 per cent since the introduction of charges. “That was the same forecast they were giving us prior to registration and the paywall going up, so whether it’s a reflection on reality or not, I don’t know.”

He warns that newspaper organisations have less muscle in internet advertising campaigns than they do in print. “Online, we have far more options than just newspaper websites – it’s not a huge loss to anyone really. If we are considering using some newspaper websites, The Times is just not in consideration.”

Others have their concerns. Adrian Drury, a media analyst at Ovum who has studied the impact of paywalls, says. “Fundamentally, at a brand-value level, you are killing the idea of times.co.uk as a channel choice for news online. That is something that is very difficult to recover.” There is also a widespread lack of enthusiasm for the new look Times website. “The most disappointing thing for me is that there doesn’t seem to have been any strategy to create unique, compelling content that would differentiate the online product,” says Paul Bradshaw, a specialist in new media journalism.

“I think it’s ‘business as usual’ – which probably betrays that this is really about protecting the print product rather than establishing a genuine business around online content.”

Rupert Murdoch’s biographer, Michael Wolff, who runs the news aggregation site Newser, is deeply unimpressed by The Times’ online offering: “It has the look of 2004 about it.” He is unconvinced that the paywall, or Rupert Murdoch’s recently expressed enthusiasm for the iPad, are signals of cultural change within the News Corporation empire. “Knowing News Corp and News International as well as I do, I’m sure that the investment they have made in technology has been minimal. There just is not a culture, a business discipline or philosophical interest in truly embracing technology.”