Does the Sunday Times iPad app provide method to News International’s payall madness?

Dec 19, 2010 by Dirk Singer

Last month there was a fair amount of comment around Rupert Murdoch’s much-stated faith in Apple’s iPad and his $30 million investment in an iPad only newspaper, provisionally called “Daily” – due for release in January.

A hint of what it might look like can be seen in the Sunday Times iPad app, which, actually – having swapped it for the print edition today – is pretty good. Just like Richard Branson’s iPad magazine ‘Project’ it mimics the newspaper reading experience pretty well by using the iPad’s screen, and like Project it adds in interactive extras such as film clips.

Signing up to a Times Plus digital subscription at £8 a month (around US $12.50), gives you access to both the Times and Sunday Times iPad apps, as well as the Times online paywall. Given that the Sunday Times print edition already costs £2.20, you actually save money by switching to the iPad version, which begs the question if the result will be to canabilise its own print buyers.

There are questions over how many digital subscribers the Times / Sunday Times actually has. Estimates range from 100k to 360k. That’s certainly not a lot compared to, say, the Mail Online which according to Comscore sees 32 million people visit the newspaper’s site every month and was recently touted by the New York Times as an online newspaper publishing phenomenon.

But then again the counter argument is: Does that actually matter as not all visitors are created equally – or the fallacy of the ‘big number.’ Last year journalism and SEO blogger Malcolm Coles wrote that 62.8% of visitors to the online editions of UK newspapers only look at a single page and leave – in other words online news is often treated as a commodity. You find what you want and click away.

Arguably someone who pays will hang around, becoming more valuable to advertisers. Time will tell if Rupert Murdoch is right and the business model he’s adopting combining online subscriptions with smartphone and tablet applications actually works.

(Chart Malcolm Coles)