Just browsing

As we wait to see the impact of the paywalls now surrounding the work of Times and Sunday Times journalists, Martin Belam of The Guardian makes a good point - that readers put off by the subscription won't necessarily turn to the website of another newspaper. Here's his key point - the whole blogpost is well worth a read.

The web isn't a newsagent. It is rather more like the table in a library with newspapers scattered across it, ready to be picked up and browsed at will.

And unlike the newsagent, that library table is no longer confined to publications 'registered with the Post Office as a newspaper'. There is no reason not to suppose that a chunk of online Times readers might just give up on all newspapers websites. They may well reason that whilst they might miss out on some opinion and columns, sites like CNN, the BBC, MSN or Yahoo! do a pretty good job of conveying "what is going on" without them having to cough up cash or betray their old readership loyalties.

And that shift won't be measured by the print-centric ABCe figures the industry uses as a benchmark. Paywall or not, those figures still only compare the performance of a very small vertical of news websites that also happen to own printing presses.