The New York Times tried this and it failed abysmally. I suspect the same will happen here.
There is an issue of accessibility. Where people are used to open and easy access to information, the added cost of access, signing up to a service when the information is readily available elsewhere, there is little benefit to be gained from paying for the content.
I suspect the phrase will be "Time Online Charging FAIL!". Certainly 'an economically exciting proposition'. Then again, so is horse number 2 in the 15:30 at Kempton and the spin of a roulette wheel. In a difficult economy there is the expectation that people will have the budget to do this. Perhaps one interesting area they have not fully considered in their 'media rich' proposition is that of copyright over international boundaries. The BBC and other web sites have this and I, like many who are not within the UK, have to skip this when blocked. Whoopee! All I do is go elsewhere for my news and the 'rich media'.
UPDATE 1
The comments on their own site should be a strong indicator that the future is not looking bright for this proposition.
It is interesting the amount of feedback I am getting from regulars and strangers alike. IF I have the time I will transfer some of the comments received along with the fly by analysis someone did with the main stories published, the 'extra' none news content etc and then compared this with the free news sites. As a brief indicator, over 70% of the main page stories were already covered equally or better on other news sites and huge chunks were simple re-writes of AP stories. The additional content is not particularly special to justify paying for it and large numbers of articles are duplicated across pages (e.g. the current lead story re Heathrow's 3rd runway is also the lead on the politics page, the Pope makes a couple of appearances too). Add to this the 'fillers' that are simple leads through to media that is readily available elsewhere and also outdated content (there is the 'Scots are ginger because of the weather' story already widely covered and now rather dated on the Science page). I provide links that people might miss and do so as a 'side interest' and for fun. Without advertising or remuneration. If I am unable to link to a TTO article (I have done so in the past) then others will not go there. While my traffic pales into insignificance with theirs, the cumulative effect will be significant. This is what I think they do not realise. There appears to be a bean-counter or policy maker sitting there on an elevated chair going "We are THE Times. People WILL visit us" when a large percentage of traffic on the web is referral driven. What is the point of someone sending me a link saying "This will be good for your blog or of interest to your visitors" if I and others are blocked by a paywall.
Oh, one other thing, from the > 60 responses I have had (bear in mind that most of my visitors are heavy consumers of internet content), there is a virtually 100% agreement on this. The political 'leaning' (about 55-45% split L/R), age (17-69), sex (70/30% M/F), and nationality demographic (UK/Europe/Global = 35/45/20%) is fairly consistent in the "There's advertising already and they want us to pay? Nah!".
In the interwebtubenet world you have to have something pretty unique in order to stand out from the crowd. News is not one of them whereas information an 'entertainment' are. Put up barriers and people will not even try to look over them or through them. In particular, where there is a clear political leaning of a paper (The Times Online is a News International organisation), those who want a particular viewpoint are able to get this equally well elsewhere. Unless TTO do something very special it is highly unlikely that people will bother even with a 'trial period' or special discount (insert your own gimmick here). The attention span is one aspect, but, and the one that many miss, a large percentage of people of internet users are simply that 'users'. They are either not technically savvy enough to work out how to make their payment, do not trust payments via the internet, or have the 'why bother when there is free news elsewhere'.
The NYT learned this the hard way, the TTO have yet to.
Clearly, they are monitoring what people are saying about this as my site visit report indicates...
For 'an economically exciting proposition', does anyone want to take bets on one of two things:
1. The duration of this foolhardy exercise.
2. The percentage drop in their site visitors (which will invariably be blamed on 'resistance to change' or similar when the target audience of internet users are exactly not averse to change and actively embrace it... unless someone expects them to pay for it)
UPDATE 2
There is an interesting blog posting re complexity being the cause of the collapse of large organisations... it happened to the Romans after all. Here.
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