... Zero. Yes, zero, according to a study by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School For Communication And Journalism. We already know thanks to several other surveys that consumers aren't exactly rushing to pay for social networking online, but the Annenberg School's study shows the most extreme reaction so far, especially considering that 49 percent of the internet users among the 1,981 survey respondents said they did use social networking sites like Twitter.

Says Jeffrey Cole, the director of the Center for the Digital Future, Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free. (For the record, Twitter hasn't said it has any plans to charge and Facebook now says on its home page that it will always be free).

The survey also echoed others that show that consumersunsurprisinglywould prefer not to pay for content online. 55 percent said they agreed or strongly agreed that they prefer having free access to online content that has advertising accompanying it rather than having to pay for the content. Only 16 percent strongly or somewhat disagree, while the remainder say they're ambivalent.

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• The 'Maybe' Of Paying for Content Online: Young Value Platform-Agnostic No-Less Valuable

It's been a few weeks now since The Times made their controversial move to take their content behind a paywall and charge online consumers to read their content.

The move has attracted a lot of attention as The Times is the first general news content provider to charge for its online content. Specialist publications such as the Wall Street Journal have successfully made the transition from free content to online paywalls, but The Times does not provide the niche content of a specialist publication and there has been ample speculation about consumers deserting The Times in favour of free online content.

We provided data to the Financial Times that revealed that The Times had lost two thirds of its market share since the paywall was erected. In the weeks before the paywall went up www.thetimes.co.uk had an average market share of 4.29% in the News and Media Print category. By the week ending 10 July 2010, The Times' market share online had dropped to 1.43%, just 33% of where it had been five weeks previously.

The latest data for the week ending 17 July 2010 shows that The Times' market share has dropped off further still to 1.37% of the News and Media Print category. The rate of decline is slowing however and the data suggests visits to The Times' website are stabilising.

Experts and commentators may crow that this is exactly what they said would happen when Rupert Murdoch first took the decision to put The Times behind a paywall. Just take a moment though to see what the site has achieved.

The Times has retained a third of their online visits, and visitors are still spending an average of around three minutes per visit on the website, indicating that they are happy to pay for the content and not disappearing to alternative sites for news.

The website is also still ranked higher than the Financial Times in terms of market share, its nearest competitor in the paywall market. The FT has received deserved praise for its financial model, with one journalist suggesting they had unlocked the secret of eternal profitability. If The Times can match that feat with its paywall then the exercise has been a success.

Time will tell if The Times loses further market share and when the introductory offer of 1 for the first 30 days expires perhaps consumers will search for their news content from other providers. So far though, The Times seems to be doing just fine. For now Mr Murdoch's gamble has paid off.

The U.K.'s Times is among the vanguard of companies erecting paywalls around the websites of old-world news publications. It's a bold move. Now some early stats are out to reveal how poorly it's working.

The figures popped up on Beehive City, sourced at a former Times media correspondent, which adds a little credence to the data. And though the data is sparse, it's telling. Here are the headline numbers.

As noted over at PaidContent, this means that the Times converted a mere 12% of its pre-paywall daily viewing audience into signed-up members during the free trial period--a figure that seems horribly low. It gets worse when you do the math to reveal that a mere tenth of these folks then elected to pay for content. In other words, 1.2% of the Times' pre-firewall audience have signed up to pay for it's newly closed-off news material. That's not a success in anyone's book--particularly if you consider what a meager pile of money this will have resulted in, compared to the ad revenues that could have been achieved by serving Net ads to the bigger audience.

But there's another stat that is actually more confusing, even while at first blush you'd think it had obvious implications: Though the paywall was free for a month, it ditched overall site visit figures by 58% during this period--merely having to sign up (for no fee) was enough of a barrier to shoo away many visitors. In the first week of payment-only access, this figure rose to 67%. In other words, the Times' grand experiment has resulted in a loss of two thirds of the number of public eyeballs viewing the site's prized news content. That seems disastrous. Or at least it would if the paper didn't have the subscription model running to deliver continuous income from loyal customers.

Is the drop in site traffic offset by this regular cash, though? It's almost impossible to guess at this stage--but it would seem unlikely that the Times' is pulling in more money overall, after this change. We can imagine that it is achieving comparable income, but to really know we'd need comment from the paper itself (which isn't forthcoming at this time) or other more circumstantial evidence that the Times' is either trying austerity measures, abandoning the paywall experiment in favor of a better system, or raking the cash in.

There is one conclusion we can draw, though: The public doesn't like paywalls. At all. It may not be a surprise to those familiar with the workings of the modern Net news systems, and who've seen the business model rapidly evolved thanks to innovations by the "new media" industry. But it's a hard statistic, and it's a sign that old-world newspapers with a smaller reputation than the Times will have a very difficult time converting their business into a paid-content model. Adding in news reports like this one from the weekend's The New York Times about how hard young journalists are finding the switch to a more real-time Web-writing mode, the future for traditional-media news organizations on the Web is looking trickier and trickier. Will we see an even bigger revolution than the paywall appear in the business before too long? If the Times' lack of paywall success is indicative of the future, it seems inevitable.

To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

The U.K.'s Times is among the vanguard of companies erecting paywalls around the Web sites of old-world news publications. It's a bold move. Now some early stats are out to reveal how poorly it's working.

The figures popped up on Beehive City, sourced at a former Times media correspondent, which adds a little credence to the data. And though the data is sparce, it's telling. Here are the headline numbers.

As noted over at PaidContent, this means that the Times converted a mere 12% of its pre-paywall daily viewing audience into signed-up members during the free trial period--a figure that seems horribly low. It gets worse when you do the math to reveal that a mere tenth of these folk then elected to pay for content. In other words, 1.2% of the Times' pre-firewall audience have signed up to pay for it's newly closed-off news material. That's not a success in anyone's book--particularly if you consider what a meagre pile of money this will have resulted in, compared to the ad revenues that could have been achieved by serving Net ads to the bigger audience.

But there's another stat that is actually more confusing, even while at first blush you'd think it had obvious implications: Though the paywall was free for a month it ditched overall site visit figures by 58% during this period--merely having to sign up (for no fee) was enough of a barrier to shoo away many visitors. In the first week of payment-only access, this figure rose to 67%. In other words, the Times' grand experiment has resulted in a loss of two thirds of the number of public eyeballs viewing the site's prized news content. That seems disastrous. Or at least it would if the paper didn't have the subscription model running to deliver continuous income from loyal customers.

Is the drop in site traffic offset by this regular cash, though? It's almost impossible to guess at this stage--but it would seem unlikely that the Times' is pulling in more money overall, after this change. We can imagine that it is achieving comparable income, but to really know we'd need comment from the paper itself (which isn't forthcoming at this time) or other more circumstantial evidence that the Times' is either trying austerity measures, abandoning the paywall experiment in favor of a better system, or raking the cash in.

There is one conclusion we can draw though: The public doesn't like paywalls. At all. It may not be a surprise to those familiar with the workings of the modern Net news systems, and who've seen the business model rapidly evolved thanks to innovations by the "new media" industry. But it's a hard statistic, and it's a sign that old-world newspapers with a smaller reputation than the Times will have a very difficult time converting their business into a paid-content model. Adding in news reports like this one from the weekend's New York Times about how hard young journalists are finding the switch to a more real-time Web-writing mode, the future for traditional-media news organizations on the Web is looking trickier and trickier. Will we see an even bigger revolution than the paywall appear in the business before too long? If the Times' lack of paywall success is indicative of the future, it seems inevitable.

To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

Newspapers are in trouble and paywalls have (so far) been a flop. While some people say this heralds the end of real journalism', maybe newspaper websites just need a rethink. Perhaps they could really learn something from blogs.

Figures leaked to Beehive City this weekend point to a slow start for Rupert Murdoch's Times paywall in the UK. Meanwhile, another story at the Guardian talks about how rival newspaper the Daily Mail's website is well on its way to turning a profit without a paywall in sight. It's also the most viewed newspaper site in the UK. How does it achieve this? I'd say it's by being more like a blog than an actual newspaper.

Let's take a look at the MailOnline front page today and see what they're doing to think web':

1. Different headlines from the paper version. MailOnline opts for the kinds of stories that might not be the biggest' of the day, but that will get people talking and sharing. In this case, a story with shock value.
2. Celebrities. MailOnline is heavy on celebrities fluff stories because they're a big draw. While they wouldn't work so well in the paper version, online you can pump out these types of posts quickly and generate lots of traffic with relatively little effort.
3. Lots of images. Many newspaper websites try to recreate the look of an actual newspaper. MailOnline forgoes that with images strewn all over the place, giving it more of a magazine' feel.
4. Talking points' work well online. Man ordered to pay 1,500 after being found guilty of drowning a squirrel is the kind of story you might see on a Gawker Media blog. It may be a serious story about animal cruelty but as we said in point 1, it's a talking point' story. It may only warrant a small mention in a print newspaper but it gets frontpage treatment here because MailOnline knows that web users have very different priorities.
5. Different editorial staff. Most newspapers' staff work across print and web. Not at the Mail, here it's two separate teams. This is important because web writing is very different to writing for print. Web articles generally work better when short and concise while print articles can spend longer telling a story'.

Many successful blogs follow the guidelines above, albeit tweaked as necessary. Technology bloggers know that Twitter and Facebook are their celebrities' that drive lots of traffic, which is why you'll see lots of mentions of those companies on tech blogs; just as celebrity blogs will mention people like Justin Beiber a lot he drives traffic.

Can newspapers be more like blogs without losing their quality'?

The Daily Mail is a tabloid and doesn't have to worry too much about losing a quality journalism' reputation by changing its output for the web. How about those newspapers often seen as high quality' news outlets? In those cases, they could probably drive more traffic, get more advertising and avoid the threat of a paywall by simply tweaking their output for the web.

Not every newspaper can overload its site with celebrity gossip and shock stories as the Mail does. However, they could likely boost their traffic by thinking web' a little more. For example, they could:

• Include more internal links. This common tactic by blogs links within the text of a story back to relevant news from the past, thus driving more pageviews.
• Use Retweetable headlines. As we've noted before, Twitter is hugely important for blogs. By carefully crafting headlines that beg to be retweeted you're increasing the chance of a hit story.
• Write short, concise stories. Not everyone has time to read a 2500 word interview. It could be summarised in a 500 word blog post' style piece, highlighting the key, newsworthy points perhaps with a link to the full thing for people suitably interested.
• Know their celebrities'. As I noted above, the celebrities' of tech blogs are currently Twitter and Facebook; stories about them drive traffic. Newspapers need to know their celebrities'.

Boosting traffic without losing site of what makes a newspaper unique is a difficult balancing act, but I can't help thinking some newspapers could prosper by thinking web' before they think paywall'.

Original title and link for this post: Why newspaper websites should be more like blogs

The wider implications of this emptiness are only just starting to become clear. A Murdoch and Fleet Street veteran with whom I've been corresponding about the paywall reported to me on his recent conversation with an A-list entertainment publicist: "What was really interesting to me was that this person volunteered a blinding realization. 'Why would I get any of my clients to talk to the Times or the Sunday Times if they are behind a paywall? Who can see it? I can't even share a link and they aren't on search. It's as though their writers don't exist anymore...'"

(Image: Desert Moon Rising, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from joshsommers's photostream)

As it has for the last four quarters, Gannett's profits rose thanks mostly to revenues from its local TV stations and continued cost cutting at its newspapers. Meanwhile, slight improvement at CareerBuilder, which had been a drag on digital revenues for over a year, pushed Gannett's interactive segment up 8.3 percent. Company-wide digital revenues, which include the Digital Segment and all interactive revenues generated by the other business units, were $252.2 million9.7 percent higher in Q2 compared to the second quarter in 2009 and were almost 19 percent of total operating revenues.

Updated: Just after Gannett (NYSE: GCI) announced its Q2 earnings, it released details of its local ad partnership with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO). The partnership will cover a portion of display inventory at Gannett's 81 U.S. community papers as well as the company's local broadcasters' websites. (Our coverage of the earnings call.)

More on digital, plus the highlights on how other Gannett units performed in Q2:

Digital: In addition to CareerBuilder, Gannett's digital holdings include rich media provider PointRoll, ShopLocal, Planet Discover, Schedule Star and Ripple6, which was folded into Pointroll in May. During the morning earnings call, Gannett is expected to discuss some other digital moves, such as naming a successor to Chris Saridakis, who left as chief digital officer in April to become CEO of GSI Commerce's Marketing Services unit. During the Q1 earnings call, CEO Craig Dubow said the company planned to have a subscription plan in place for its USAT iPad app by July 5th, but the company backed off after finding that advertising sales on the app were sold out. Dubow is expected to provide an update on those plans on this morning's call.

Publishing: Gannett posted some pretty good numbers here, though it helps to keep in mind that it's coming off the worst year for advertising since the Great Depression. With that context out of the way, operating income at the publishing unit, which includes the community papers and Gannett flagship USA Today, was up 20.8 percent over Q209. That was due to slowing revenue declines as well as $20 million in savings from mandatory, unpaid leave that staffers took in the quarter. Publishing revenues declined 6 percent and classifieds fell only 5 percent, which is a major improvement over the nearly 45 percent decline for that section last year.

USAT: The softness in the travel industry continues to plague USAT. While automotive, retail and packaged goods categories increased spending on the newspaper in Q2, it wasn't able to balance out travel. Paid ad pages in USAT totaled 580 compared with 602 in last year's second quarter.

Broadcasting: Profits were up 56 percent and ad revenues grew 19.6 percent. Thanks to expectations of high political ad spending, Gannett is projecting revenues to be up in the mid-twenties in Q3. The Yahoo display ad partnership is set to begin rolling out now, and by the time Q3 ends, the online side should be able to generate a small contribution.

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The Wall Street Journal has by far the highest e-reader circulation of any newspaper in the U.S., according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data cited in a recent report by the World Association of Newspapers.

The Journal had generated 414,025 e-subscriptions as of April 2010, up 8% from 383,199 in April 2009.

By comparison, The New York Times ranks No. 3 on the report's list of the top 25 e-reader circulations, with 90,934 downloaded as of this April versus 43,844 as of last. (See chart below)

As we've recently reported, The Journal is killing it in the iPad department, with more than 10,000 subscriptions sold, and $2.4 million in revenue generated from them, as of June. The Journal's iPad app costs $17.99/month. The Times' is free.

The Detroit Free Press edged out The Times in the No. 2 spot with 105,210 subscriptions. Last year, that paper ranked No. 17 with 15,776 subscriptions. (In December 2008, the Detroit Free Press announced it would be scaling back its home-delivered print edition to three days a week, which probably accounts for the massive jump in e-subscriptions.)

Interestingly, Women's Wear Daily, the fashion, retail and media trade pub, also made the list, ranking No. 22 with 22,474 subscriptions.

From the report (emphasis our own):

The Audit Bureau of Circulations now counts readers of e-editions and mobile editions as part of the newspaper's circulation, as long as the editions are paid for at least one cent. The top 25 newspapers in the United States now represent 1.36 million subscribers for e-editions, headed by the Wall Street Journal, which has an audited subscriber base of 414,036. While the numbers are dramatic, many newspapers bundle their subscriptions, print and e-editions together. Those newspapers that are creating incremental circulation include the Denver Post, and also the Detroit News and Detroit Free-Press, which have suspended newspaper publishing several days per week, and do not offer alternatives other than the e-edition.

And here are the rankings:

Join the conversation about this story

See Also:

• Arthur Sulzberger Jr.: NYT's Metered Paywall Is About Building 'Emotional Connection' With Readers
• CHART OF THE DAY: Huffington Post Takes Over The World
• New York Times Tells Wall Street Journal To Cease And Desist Over Stolen Ad Copy

I'm experimenting with the Guardian's new WordPress plugin. Forgive me.

If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won't exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you're probably already reading this on your computer screen. And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.

You have probably never even heard of Shirky, and until this interview I hadn't either. When I ask him to define what he does, he laughs, and admits that often when he's leaving a party someone will say to him, What exactly is it you do? His standard reply I work on the theory and practice of social media is not just wilfully opaque, but crushingly dreary, which is funny, because he is one of the most illuminating people I've ever met.

The people who know about Shirky call him an internet guru. He winces when I say so Oh, I hate that! and it's easy to see why, for he is the very opposite of the techie stereotype. Now 46, his first career was in the theatre in New York, and he didn't even own a computer until the age of 28, when he had to be introduced to the internet by his mother. Arrestingly self-assured and charismatic, his conversation is warm and discursive, intently engaged yet relaxed but it's his rhetorical fluency which bowls you over. The architecture of his argument is a Malcolm Gladwell-esque structure of psychological and sociological insight, analysing contemporary technology with the clarity of a historian's perspective and such authority that were he to tell you the sun actually sets in the east, you might almost believe him. At the very least, you'd probably want to and if a guru is defined by the credulous deference he commands from others, then Shirky unquestionably qualifies. Within minutes I found myself hanging on his every word despite being temperamentally hostile to almost everything he believes.

Shirky has been writing about the internet since 1996. As the chief technological officer for several web design companies during the 90s, he was quickly hired as a consultant by major media companies News Corporation, Time Warner, Hearst all curious about this new thing called the world wide web. In 2000, following an intuition that the internet was turning social, Shirky turned to the fledgling phenomenon of online social networking an obscure concept back then, but which has since evolved into MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, to become the web's primary purpose for billions of people all over the world. Shirky now teaches new media at New York University, and in 2008 published his first book, Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, which celebrated individuals' new power to communicate, organise and change the world via the web.

His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail.

Everyone's waiting to see what will happen with the paywall it's the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don't think the numbers add up. But then, interestingly, he goes on, Here's what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they're critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn't want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times.

This criticism echoes the sentiment of Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The book argues that the popularity of online social media trumps all our old assumptions about the superiority of professional content, and the primacy of financial motivation. It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia for no financial reward because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness. Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.

Unfortunately, I am precisely the sort of cynic Shirky's new book scorns a techno-luddite bewildered by the exhibitionism of online social networking (why does anyone feel the need to tweet that they've just had a bath, and might get a kebab later?), troubled by its juvenile vacuity (who joins a Facebook group dedicated to liking toast?), and baffled by the amount of time devoted to posting photos of cats that look amusingly like Hitler. I do, however, recognise that what I like to think of as my opinions are really emotional prejudices. But equally, Shirky's prediction for Murdoch's paywall sounds suspiciously like an emotional objection, rather than a financial calculation. How, then, can he be certain his entire analysis of the internet isn't just as subjective as my kneejerk cynicism?

I'd say first of all that the notion that any expression of the world can be a value-neutral description of what life is really like is a fantasy, right? he agrees readily. We're all postmodern enough to recognise that any writer on any subject is operating within those constraints. And I have the amiably simple-minded view of this stuff you would expect from an American, which is that I think freedom is good, full stop. So therefore I think I'm probably constitutionally incapable of seeing a massive spread in those freedoms as being anything other than salutary for society.

But ultimately, over the long haul I'm vetted on accuracy, not on enthusiasm. So if I'm wrong about paywall, I've got no place to hide. I will have been flamingly, publicly wrong for 15 years. There will be no way I can weasel out of it. He laughs, looking sublimely untroubled by this possibility.

The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since.

The one point of agreement between internet utopians and sceptics has been their techno-deterministic assumption that the web has fundamentally changed human behaviour. Both sides, Shirky says, are wrong. Techies were making the syllogism, if you put new technology into an existing situation, and new behaviour happens, then that technology caused the behaviour. But I'm saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it's because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours but they don't cause them. Had Facebook been around when he was in his 20s, he cheerfully admits, he too would have spent his youth emailing photos of himself to everyone he knew.

But even if he's right, and the internet has merely unveiled ancient truths about human behaviour, isn't it still legitimate to feel a little bit dismayed by Facebook's revelation of almost infinite narcissism? Shirky lets out a polite but weary sigh. Would the world really be better off if we were to hide from ourselves the fact that teenagers waste a lot of time trying to either flirt with each other or to crack each other up? Like, to whom was this a mystery, prior to the launch of Facebook? He grins in good-natured amazement.

Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time because that's been true of every medium ever launched.

Shirky concedes that the web's ability to connect people with a common enthusiasm, however obscure or deviant, can create a dangerously distorted impression of what is healthy or normal. But so the question in all of this stuff, always, always, always, is: is the net trade-off better or worse for society? I've never been a cyber utopian. I've always understood that this is a set of trade-offs. So for all the normalisation of, say, paedophilia, we also get young small-town kids growing up gay who now know they're not abnormal. And it seems to me that the net trade-off of lessening society's ability to project a sense of normal that no one actually lives up to is a good thing.

I don't mean to say it will therefore be an endless fountain of raindrop-flavoured kittens from now till St Swithin's day. But rather, in the same way that we've generally decided that the printing press was a good thing and I would contrast that with television, which in my mind is an open question rather than just saying in the panglossian way that all new technologies are an improvement, it is an on-the-balance calculation.

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield produced a report last year which suggested that the popularity of online social media was damaging children's brain development, in particular their capacity for empathy. Shirky has two children, aged nine and six, and says they live in a very restricted media household, with only supervised access to a communal computer. I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the internet in the first two years. It can be addictive and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains. Riding a bicycle changes our brains. Watching TV changes our brains. If there's a screen you need to worry about in your household, it's not the one with a mouse attached.

Shirky does not own a television. Americans watch, collectively, two hundred billion hours of television a year, and if online social media diverts even just a fraction of that time, he argues, that has to be a good thing. As I say in the book, even the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act. And I'd still take the most inane collaborative website over someone watching yet another half hour of TV.

By now, despite myself, I'm having to reconsider my old snootiness towards social media. There's just one last thing, I say. Had I never been online before, and had just read his book, I'd probably be so inspired by his account of the creative and collaborative instincts of the online community, I'd be rushing to log on. But if I started out on, say, the Guardian's Comment is free site, the sheer nastiness of many of the commenters would floor me like a train. If the web has unlocked all this human potential for generosity and sharing, how come the people using it are so horrible to each other?

Shirky smiles, confident that he has the answer even to this. So, there's two things to this paradox. One is that those conversations were always happening. People were saying those nasty things to one another in the pub or whatever. You just couldn't hear them before. So it's a change in our awareness of truth, not a change in the truth.

Then there's this second effect, that anonymity makes people behave more meanly. What I think is going to happen there is we are slowly going to set up islands of civil discourse. There's no way to make the internet not anonymous and if there was, the most enthusiastic consumers of that technology would be Iranian and Chinese and Burmese governments. But there are ways of saying, while you're here, use your real identity. We need to set up the social norms which say in this space you need to use your real names, or some well-known handle.

Whenever you say that, people cry censorship, but frankly? Fuck off. He breaks off, laughing. You know, getting that right is important. The whole, Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good that's the really big challenge.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky is published by Allen Lane, price 20

This article was amended on 5 July 2010. The original referred to Western Union telegrams looking arcane today. This has been corrected.

guardian.co.uk Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Previously

• How I learned to stop worrying and love the blog
• The Guardian gets it
• Listen to your readers

Earlier this week Gawker's Hamilton Nolan wrote that Rolling Stone has little hope of capitalizing on the notoriety of Michael Hastings' profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to increase newsstand sales and drive more subscriptions. As Nolan writes, [w]hereas once people would have rushed out to newsstands to pick up copies of Rolling Stone and read what all fuss was about with McChrystal, now they either A) read that one single story on RS's website, for free, or B) read it at the competition's website for free, which is what happened in this case. (Rolling Stone's inability to get its own story online in a timely fashion remains frankly mind-boggling.)

Nolan argues that Rolling Stone, Esquire and Vanity Fair put out stories as good as those found in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but magazines in the former group aren't taken seriously as a whole because their good stuff is mixed in with so much fluff. He calls this Good Stories, Bad Magazine Syndrome, and laments that Rolling Stone and other sufferers will never put out enough of those stories to make the types of people who care about those stories seriously consider reading the magazine on a regular basis.

Good point, but Nolan isn't really talking about the puzzle of how you brand a combination of get-everybody-talking journalism and cotton-candy features. He's discussing a much larger problem:

Everyone knows that you don't need to subscribe to Rolling Stone in order to read the five great stories they publish every year; just wait until you hear those stories mentioned elsewhere and check in thenThe internet has split each and every story from every outlet into its own discrete item. Unless your publication is consistent enough to somehow pull all of these separate links into a coherent whole, you'll never be a destination, per se. You're just hosting writers and writing checks.

Nolan comes face-to-face with that problem, but I think he blinked. Because what if consistency isn't enough? What happens to news organizations as we know them if this atomization of content is so thorough and irreversible that no publication can pull its discrete articles into a coherent whole? Without coherent brands, will any publication host writers and write checks?

In the months after I went freelance, I talked with a few organizations about potential newsroom jobs. During the first couple such conversations, I apologized for having read plenty of articles from Publication X without being familiar with its site, explaining that I mostly read individual articles that found their way to me. Later, I quit apologizing because this is increasingly the reality of how more and more of us read. Among general-interest publications, I read The Atlantic and The New Yorker because they still show up at the house in print. I skim The New York Times because it's the closest thing I have to a hometown paper, which is either nostalgia or dangerously close to it. For me, every other brand has been blown to fragments that arrive sifted by Twitter and Facebook, or are turned up by search. The future may belong to bottom-up brands designed to be encountered in bits and pieces the home pages of companies such as Demand Media, About.com and YouTube are rarely glimpsed and for all intents and purposes irrelevant.

As the fragmentation of content continues, the importance of traditional brands' section pages and home pages will continue to wane which newsroom middle managers will find a lot more frightening than readers will. Section and home pages aggregate news for readers, yes, but readers are increasingly doing that themselves through personalization, or trusting their peers to do it for them. Too often, home pages are committee-built disasters anyway a cacophony of news, features and corporate messaging from every internal constituency too big to be ignored. Readers, relentlessly trained to hunt for signal, rightly dismiss them as noise. When he was consulting for the Guardian, TBD.com's Jim Brady shut down the Guardian America front page, explaining to PaidContent's David Kaplan that you're better off putting your stories on Twitter and posting them on Digg and Facebook and pitching them to blogs that can move a lot of traffic, than posting them on a section front that's getting no traffic anyway. One of the things I pushed for was that you have to get away from the idea of getting people to simply come to your home page. You have to get your home page to the people.

If destination sites crumble, how do the bills get paid? I believe that people will pay for content [disclosure: I'm a consultant for Journalism Online], but paywalls and meters limited to a single site may be short-term solutions, because they're ideas that spring from the old model of large brands and destination sites. Ultimately, what we may need is not paywalls but paytags bits of code that accompany individual articles or features, and that allow them to be paid for. MTV's Maya Baratz is ahead of the curve here, urging publishers to think of their products not as platforms, but as apps which to Baratz means not only allowing, but thriving off of, having your content live elsewhere. But between wallet friction and the penny gap, the mechanics of paytags make paywalls and single-site meters look like comparatively simple problems to solve.

As readers, we understand that publications have been atomized our own habits increasingly show us that every day. But publishers need to face the consequences of what that means. And that won't be easy: Their entire world, from planning to production to distribution to promotion to how to get people to pay for it, is built around a fundamentally different set of organizing principles. What if those organizing principles are already obsolete?

Want to see what the launch of a paywall does to a news site's traffic? Take a look at this graph from Hitwise.

While other sites have held steady, the Times' market share has dropped from 4.37% during the week ending May 22nd to 2.67% last week. Its average session time has also fallen from an average of five and half to three minutes. However, as Hitwise's Robin Goad notes: That figure is actually higher than many people would have expected, given that a lots of visitors will be spending very little time there if they are choosing not to register.

The Times doesn't strictly have a proper pay'wall yet, it's simply asking users to register to view content for the time being. When users have to pay, we can probably expect an even greater drop.

Of course, The Times shouldn't be too worried by the drop. Introduction of a paywall was always bound to reduce the site's audience. The fact that The Times gets a regular income from that smaller audience is much more important to publisher News International.

Original title and link for this post: Times Traffic Drops Off a Cliff After Paywall Launch

Google has the blogosphere and the media buzzing after a report from Italian daily La Repubblica announced that the company is readying to launch a paid content format to be called "Newspass" by year end.

Click to read the rest of this post...

Prescott Shibles / eMedia Vitals:
Should publishers trust Google's new paywall initiative? Google is currently recruiting publishers for a new paid content system that will launch by the end of the year, according to a report in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. While Google has positioned this move as a means of helping newspapers

Jarvis Coffin / Burst Media Company Blog:
Paywalls Don't Determine the Difference Between Good and Bad Media My understanding of the whole paywall issue isn't that it's so much about making subscription money as it is about reasserting the value of proprietary content to advertisers. It has been widely discussed, here and elsewhere, that content is substantially free.

Michael Wolff / Newser:
The Paywall Revolution Could Actually Be a Revolution Follow him on Twitter @MichaelWolffNYC Rupert Murdoch puts up a paywall around his Times and Sunday Times in London next week. The New York Times is indicating it will put its wall up in January.

"A pay-wall MIGHT make a little money -- we will make a lot."

Shared by Sean
I dont think that's bad at all. Most sites credit that much to search referrals.

Hollywood trade magazine Variety has seen Web traffic slump by more than 40% since enacting a paywall at the end of 2009, according to Neilsen data published by MediaPost.

The site garnered 3.2 million page views in December, the month it enacted the paywall. Since then, traffic has dropped to 1.9 million page views in March. Unique visitors fell from 745,000 to 609,000 in the same period. Variety charges $250 a year for a print subscription with online access, and the same rate for online access without the paper version.

Neil Stiles, president of Variety, has said that he expected unique visitors to decline after the paywall was enacted, and that the publication hopes to retain a "core audience" that will remain.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Over the past six months, newspaper earnings results have been relatively positive as Gannett (NYSE: GCI), the NYTCo (NYSE: NYT) and McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) have returned to profitability and ad declines have abated. When Gannett kicks off the Q1 newspaper earnings season on Friday morning, analysts expect additional signs of stability, thanks to year of cost-cutting and a slight uptick in marketers' ad spending.

But those reasons for optimism in the short term don't change the bigger picture: newspapers are coming off the worst year in the modern history, and the long term still looks uncertain to say the least. Two big questions loom: Can newspaper companies maintain their lower cost models? And will they be able to grow revenues amid a tentative economic recovery?

Company: Gannett
When report: Friday
What to expect: In an analyst presentation last month (transcript here), Gannett execs indicated that though ad spending is still down from last year, the rate of decline has moderated to the single digits. In a research note issued this week, JP Morgan said Gannett's newspaper ad revenues should decline 7.2 percent in Q1, with total newspaper revenues down 6.4 percent. JP Morgan is projecting Ebitda to come in around $261 million, a 19.7 percent margin, a nice improvement from Q109's 14.3 percent.

High Olympics and Super Bowl ratings and rising local ad spending, particularly by automakers, have already helped boost broadcast revenues by over 20 percent. But that won't be enough to offset continuedif slowingad declines at the newspapers, which have fallen 7.5 percent in the first two months of the year; also digital is being pulled down 5 percent by Careerbuilder, according to Gannett execs speaking to us at last month's analyst event. Although that might not sound like good news, consider that in Q109, publishing revs plummeted 26.9 percent, as digital fell 13.1 percent. In the Community Publishing segment, the company sees retail and classified finishing falling about 10 percent from Q1 in 2009. Overall, a Thomson Reuters' analysts poll calls for earnings of $0.41 per share on revenue of $1.32 billion.

- Company: NYTCo.
When report: April 22
What to expect: : JP Morgan says newspaper-ad revenues will decline roughly 8 percent in Q1, slightly better than the 10 percent previously anticipated. Digital is looking stronger, mainly at the About Group, which should be up 18 percent in Q1. Cost-cutting will continue to prop up profits, but by the end of the year, unless the economy and attendant revenues show better-than-expected improvement, the company will have difficulty maintaining margins.

Wells Fargo newspaper analyst John Janedis says: We see little if any upside to Q1 earnings for NYT, as important ad categories like telecom could still drop 47 percent while tech is down 27 percent. (On the plus side, national auto spending is trending upward 15 percent.)

- Company: McClatchy
When report: April 22
What to expect: JP Morgan forecasts that ads will be off by 8.4 percent as circulation continues to grow. While the circulation gains might not offset negativity on the ad front, cost-cuts should help margins jump to 25 percent from Q109's 12 percent. Ebitda should rise 91 percent to $83 million. In general, McClatchy's heavy presence in Florida and California means that its fortunes are directly tied to the economic winds in those two troubled states. Ultimately, that will add to the general industry-wide woes affecting the publisher.

- Company: EW Scripps
When report: May
What to expect: : Like Gannett, it has benefitted from cost-cuts and broadcast revenue gains. And just like most other newspapers, it is still trying to slow ad declines. JP Morgan projects a 12.5 percent decline in Scripps' newspaper revenue, an improvement over Q4's 15 percent drop.

A note about the industry: Digital ad revenues are still largely tied to print upsells, a practice that tends to depress online sales dollars. Gannett, McClatchy and EW Scripps (NYSE: SSP) have been trying to increase digital's independence, but that will take time. Meanwhile, the gains from last year's cost-cuts will evaporate later this year unless publishers find new areas to cut and/or find new ways of driving revenues. The NYTimes.com is still about a year away from instituting its metered online access, but it might discuss ways of charging for mobile content, particularly on Apple's new iPad. For now, these incipient paywall effortsMcClatchy stands out for resisting the current paid content trendwill not have any appreciable affect on publishers, but may be enough to maintain the hard-won confidence of investors for at least a little while longer.

Related

• Gannett's Debt Reduction Efforts Free Up Cash For Possible Investments
• McClatchy Swings To Profit On Cost-Cutting; Online Ad Dollars Jump 15 Percent; No Plans For Paywalls
• NYTCo Triples Q4 Profit Aided By Lower Costs, Better Ad Numbers; Digital Ad Rev Up 11 Percent

Carlo Longino / Techdirt:
Daily Variety: We're Putting In A Paywall So We Don't Have To Write About Gossip Andy Marx writes in to share a letter Daily Variety magazine sent to its subscribers, letting them know that it will soon be putting up a paywall, or as it prefers to call it, a velvet rope.

Eric Schmidt came to DC Sunday night to praise, not to bury newspapers, deftly massaging egos about the value of journalism while sliding in all the reasons they should still be concerned about the futureand the suggestion that Google (NSDQ: GOOG) should be seen as a partner. News still matters, Schmidt told members of the American Society of News Editors, with newspapers responsible for more than half of all original news coverage by his calculations: We have a business model problem, we don't have a news problem.

One reason, says Schmidt, the internet replaced the economics of scarcity with economics of abundance and all of us are dealing with the consequences of that. Another: in the always-on internet world, our children know about now, precisely now, in a way that our parents did not. That always-connected sense isn't for kids alone. Turn off your internet connection for an instant, Schmidt suggested, and get a taste of how jarring the result can be. It takes away your sense of connectedness.

Schmidt insisted at the start and again in an informal chat with a few reporters that he wasn't there to tell newspapers how to run their business. That didn't keep him from riffing on ways Google and others might be able to help them make money while briefing the smallish opening night crowd on the primacy of mobile and the wonders of the cloud. So where's the money? Where it's always been for newspapersadvertising and subscriptions.

Google is still looking for approval of its AdMob acquisitionSchmidt says Apple's just-announced iAds plans should helpbut that's not holding him back from painting a pretty picture of the potential for targeted mobile ads. Part of that picture includes display ads that look like an awful lot like the ads in traditional newspapers. With that plus Google's success in text ads, we should able to do very successful advertising against this kind of content. (It may not be able to do it against murdersa real business problem.) As for approval: It seems obvious to me that with the number of players and different choices, this is one that should go through.

Subscriptions and higher profitability: As for subscriptions, Google and others are working on ubiquitous ways subscriptions can be bundled, packaged, delivered. You see this today on the Kindle and the iPad, both of which have subscriptions models you can test and find out what people will pay for it. Eventually that model should have higher profitability because it has lower cost of goods. ... There's every reason to believe that eventually we'll solve this. He added later with reporters: I think some combination of advertising plus subscriptions will work. I think it's too early to say exactly what that combination will be. ... It will be a mixture. Something you want everyone in the world to see, you advertise. Stuff that you want your subscribers to see, you'll have a smaller but more lucrative audience. You'll have a mixture. He compares it cable television.

Mobile first: When I say internet first, I mean mobile first, Schmidt explained, echoing a recent Google refrain that has been growing louder. That's where the action is. That's where the growth is. It's a completely unwashed landscape. Holding up in succession a Nexus One, a Kindle and an iPad, then nested together, he added, each of these form factors, tablets, represents in many ways your future. Then he warned them, again ever so gently, against thinking any one kind of device is the answer. People like different devices for different reasons because a mobile device is personal in a fundamental way newsprint couldn't be.

Schmidt's news reader concept: If you look at the most recent one of these, the iPad, there are a number of very compelling applications but by organizations here in this room, each of which represents a different experiment. Schmidt suggests a not-too-distant future where the next version of a news readers know not only who you are but where you've beenthe newspaper doesn't realize whether I read it yesterday and it will be more interactive and real-time, it will integrate everything. When I go to a news site, I want that news site to know more about me, what I care about. I don't want to be treated as a stranger. To avoid what we used to call daily me where all you see is what you want and ask for, though, in Schmidt's ideal news world, the site offers him options he might not like. I want you to challenge me. Here's something new; here's something you didn't know; here's an opposing view. Two thirds will ignore the option; he wants to reach the third that won't. This has particular resonance if you think about the way Google has been using actions to predict behavior or to deliver information with Google Buzz, ad targeting in GMail and other areas.

Murdoch: As for his own Rupert Murdoch problem, suggested Schmidt, It's best to look at Rupert's comments in context of a business negotiation.

How did it fly?: When I asked him afterward if he feels a change in tone in the way ASNE and others in newspapers respond to him and Google these days, he replied, I think these issues have been around for a while. I think Rupert's comments have sort of galvanized that. Does he see any improvement? I think there's more communication. This problem will be solved when newspapers are making bundles of money and the sooner we can make that happen ...

Related

• Paywall Brigade: The Newspapers That Now Charge For Online Access
• Murdoch's Plan For Paywall Success: Readers Will Pay 'When They've Got Nowhere Else To Go'
• Steve Jobs: Here's How Apple Will Beat Google At Mobile Advertising
• Congressmen Call For FTC To Look Into Google BuzzAnd AdMob Deal Too

The Financial Times' metered online paywall system is considered one of the more successful models, but a new partnership with location-based social net Foursquare is aimed at younger readers who are most resistant to paywalls. The partnership will launch sometime in the next few weeks, Business Insider reports.

The partnership is limited to specific areas on Foursquare, which lets users check in at various locations via their mobile phones, alerting users they're connected with. The FT has chosen a number of cafes and businesses situated within business districts and schools such as Columbia, Harvard and the London School of Economic, among others. When Foursquare users check in at a designated spot, they can earn points that will ultimately unlock the FT.com's online subscriptions, which can run from $183.04 for 52 weeks (or $3.59 per week) for unlimited access to $299 ($5.75 per week) for mobile access included as part of a premium sub.

The move is notable because the FT has been so ardent in defending its pay system. Clearly, the Foursquare deal shows that the FT isn't about to give up on its metered model, but it demonstrates that even one of the prime examples of paywalls has to be flexible when it comes to attracting younger users.

Related

• FT.com Takes Free Articles Away From Unregistered Users, Except Via Search
• Microsoft's Bing Adds Foursquare To Maps
• Zagat Books A Table With Foursquare; Restaurant Maven Reaches For Mobile App's Cool Factor