Sign of the times
Three has thrown in a ‘free' 3 month subscription to the Times newspaper's two websites as part of its mobile broadband deal.
The Times and The Sunday Times websites got a controversial pay wall just 4 months ago in one of the riskiest media experiments in recent years.
Three's Head of Customer Propositions Mobile Broadband, Alys Mathew, said: "As more people consume news online, a partnership with The Times is a perfect offer for our mobile broadband customers. Three's network has over 97 percent population coverage for 3G services, so we're happy to expand the reach of The Times online readership across the country to more mobile devices."
Following the 3 month period, PAYG customers who top up every 30 days will continue to get free access to the site for the next month, while contract customers can extend their subscription for £2 a week for both titles. Three said the offer will run until 31 March next year.
The Times said its revamped website offers the usual news plus daily debates, an iPad edition, invites to events, offers, downloads and competitions - (i.e. they think it's worth the cash).
At the beginning of November, the BBC reported visits to The Times and The Sunday Times website had plummeted by 87 percent with around 105,000 people paying to read their content online or on their mobiles.
Times Online was reportedly registering around 21m users earlier this year but that number has now fallen to just 2.7m in October. Apparently the paper also has around 100,000 joint subscriptions for people that want the newspaper in print and online.
There are thought to be 2m unique users for The Times' website and 700,000 for its Sunday edition. Execs at the paper had previously said they expected to lose 90 percents of online readers when they started charging £2 a week for the content or £9.99 for a monthly iPad subscription.
The Times' editor, James Harding, told Auntie: "It's very early days but we're hugely encouraged by what we've seen. We're seeing that those people who are reading the digital editions of the Times and the Sunday Times really like them, if they sign up for a trial they tend to stick with us."
He added: "We'd engaged in a quite suicidal form of economics - which was giving our journalism away for free. We knew that if we continued to do that we couldn't invest in reporting. Our concern was would we be cut off from the 'internet conversation' and the truth is we haven't been."
