The great media experiment begins as London’s The Times and Sunday Times erects a paywall that requires online readers to subscribe.

So what are they selling? Simple really, either you buy today’s edition – or you buy a subscription to all the editions this month.

No atomic content sales here! No micro payments of 2p for 1 article – no! Just as we forecast, we have returned to selling newspapers!

Hurray!

The big question now is – can The Times make it work?

Well, time will tell – but let’s take a look at their offer. You have two choices

• £1 for a day pass (ie today’s edition) – sold rather like WiFi access is sold – on a time limited basis.

or

• £1 for 30 days (ie a subscription) – with repeat billing at £2 per week after the first month – or £8.66 per month.

So what does this tell us about strategy?

Clearly, everyone will choose the £1 for 30 days over the £1 for one day! So, the pricing is designed to turn us into subscribers.

And, what are we subscribing to? A £104 per year subscription. Is that a lot or a little? Well, my Economist subscription renewal has just arrived and I’m offered a 47% discount which means I pay £108 per year.

Practically the same then!

What is interesting is how this relates to buying copies at the newstand. Each copy would cost £1 during weekdays and £1.50 for the Saturday paper. The Sunday Times costs £2.

So, add it all up and you ‘could’ spend £442 per year on buying every copy of The Times and The Sunday Times. So, will the offer be shown as 77% off? Well, maybe, but who buys every copy every day? Perhaps a library – but no sane individual?

Hence, there would appear to be a growing practice of charging just over £100 for an annual subscription for a quality news feed.

And it fits well – because even if you took the view that you would only buy the paper 3 times per week plus the a Sunday paper – and not holidays – so 48 weeks of the year – your annual cost would still be £240.

And, of course, this subscription gives you access to the mobile (iphone) edition too – which, if bought through a different iPad subscription is a more expensive £9.99 per month. Now, the iPad edition is not great to navigate – the FT does a far better job – but that is another story.

The point is that the current pricing model adopted by The Times makes internet buying of newspapers a bargain!

Great – so the pricing strategy is clear – and is based on The Economist superbly successful subscription model. Now, will it work?

Want me to get off the fence and answer that? Well, of course, I have to say yes.

Why? Simply, the pricing is very attractive but also based on very sound principles – The Economist probably the best selling subscription product in the world and people are already paying for it – and The Times have taken a leaf out of their book (or newspaper).

Ooohhh the iPad!

On one hand – 2 million boxes shifted worldwide – so far.

On the other hand, slight disappointment.

Hmmm….

Do I, don’t I? Do I get an iPad, or not?

Well, at a basic level, yes, I want one. Just to be a part of the hype and excitement.

But, there is a version two coming very soon – the data plans that go with the iPad are currently rubbish and duplicate my existing plans… and then there are all the competitor products coming in the Autumn too.

Okay, so we are in business – a tablet device will be mine before the end of the year.

But who’s? iPad doesn’t run flash – that’s kind of annoying. Nor, as my daughter tells me, does it allow me to listen to music whilst reading a digital book – that is a shame (unless I hack it, of course).

But worse of all, Wired Magazine launched on the iPad last week and didn’t quite live up to its billing – and its You Tube videos of how it might look and feel on an iPad.

The complaints? Well, it took too long to download, the experience was poor – although the design was brilliant. Check this site for a further discussion of why the tradition high gloss magazine isn’t translating directly onto the iPad.

So, there we have it – the new digital magazine format – designed for tablet devices – is still up for grabs. No one, has, yet delivered the slam dunk digital magazine on this format. But somehow, there has been pretty broad acceptance that the future lies with tablets – for reading and enjoying media.

And there lies the opportunity ….

The Times and Sunday Times are taking their first steps to charging for news.

You can register at http://www.timesplus.co.uk/welcome/index.htm to get a ‘preview’ of what is to come  – and yes, it is all about paying, but it is also about paying for the new generation of digital media.

The point here is that we are about to see a new generation of digital media – perhaps partly inspired by the new devices that can carry it – but far more interactive, graphical and video based, than before.

Interesting development.

The FT is not going to ’sell content’ online but they are going to start to sell daily newspapers online. Remember, the daily newspaper is the essence of any newspaper brand.

In an interesting report (also on the FT) the news was headlined as FT selling content for micropayments.

However, the really interesting news is that the FT is not going to sell individual articles (content) – but individual daily newspapers.

The mooted price is £2 – which is a similar price to what people pay at the newsagents.

It does rather seem that we have a hallelujah moment here. Suddenly, online media looks like offline media only distributed digitally as opposed to via newsagents.

Suddenly, you get the feeling here, what’s the big deal to buy a newspaper for £2? Do you have an issue with that? Of course not.

So, by dropping all this nonsense of online media is different, we can just see digital as a different distribution route for the same ideas.

Of course, there may be a few interesting developments here – such as the daily print newspaper containing a voucher which allows the reader to view it online… to deliver an enhanced brand experience  … an automatically download copy to your iPad …. or perhaps not?

It will be interesting to see what the FT does – and then even more interesting to see how the FT adapts its model to reflect consumer response.

But this is the first clear sign that media owners will return to selling packaged and branded goods (in this case a daily newspaper) and stop all the silly nonsense around selling single articles for pennies.

Print media owners figured out years ago that readers didn’t want to stand at the newstand shelling out 2p for each article they found interesting. No, they just wanted to hand over the money, get the package/ paper/ book/ magazine, and take it away.

Not so very different after all?

We Live in Interesting Times! (with apologies to the FT’s We Live in Financial Times strapline)