Waiting at the bus stop with ten minutes to spare and only my mobile phone for company, I click on the new Sun+ app which I have recently downloaded and flick through its mix of catchy news stories, celebrity gossip and Mystic Meg’s horoscopes. In what seems like no time at all, my bus arrives.
Since 1 August, when it urged readers to ‘Get Involved’, with a humorous advertising campaign, The Sun has charged for access online, via tablet or mobile phone. In return for £2 a week, Sun+ members can read stories from the newspaper online or on mobile devices, watch clips of goals from Barclays Premiership football matches minutes after they are scored and several hours before they are aired on football round-up shows, gain at least £200 worth of vouchers and give-aways each month, and from October, play Sun+ Lotto.
The Sun is the first UK popular title to adopt a subscription model, following in the footsteps of its News UK stable-mates, The Times and The Sunday Times. It may seem a bold move, when rivals such as Mirror.co.uk and MailOnline remain free to access, but Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, believes it is a logical step for the Murdoch-owned title.
The Bundling Approach
“You only have to go back through the history of News UK, formerly News International, to see how keen on bundling the company is,” explains Professor Luckhurst. “The reason for attempting to buy the remaining stake in BSkyB was that they saw potential profit in trying to link together newspaper, online and TV. News UK is trying to bundle together products to which it has the rights and then target the audience which is going to want them.”
Professor Luckhurst adds: “People have begun to learn that unless you are generating colossal traffic, the free-access online model is not effective. If you are getting the sort of level that The Guardian or MailOnline is getting, the advertising-only model probably works, but The Sun was not getting that level of traffic, so it needs to be much more effective about identifying its special qualities.”
The jewel in the crown of Sun+ is the rights to show Premiership football goals and highlights, which News UK snapped up in January in a £30m-plus three-year deal. In addition, Sun+ has acquired the rights to show goals and other highlights from the Scottish Premiership and, from next year, the FA cup, immediately after they are scored.
To capitalise on these digital properties, News UK has launched an online football TV channel exclusive to Sun+ members called The Sun FC, with a weekday and Saturday morning show hosted by former England and Arsenal footballer and Sun columnist of six-years standing, Ian Wright, a daily news bulletin presented by former Sky Sports News and Al Jazeera Sport presenter Samantha Johnson, and a Thursday night football comedy show called Six Pack. Soon to be added to this mix is the cheekily-named Matchday Show presented by the comedian, writer and TV host Nat Coomes, with commentary from fellow presenters such as Jon Champion, which will be available online from 6.30pm on a Saturday, showing highlights from all that day’s Premiership matches a full four hours before BBC One’s Match of the Day. While The Sun FC is beamed out from a dedicated television studio at News UK’s Wapping HQ, the Matchday Show will be filmed at the ITN studios on London’s Grays Inn Road. ITN holds the rights to produce all of the Sun+ Goals footage.
Male oriented?
But is all this focus on football a bit blokey? Certainly, as a woman with only a passing interest in football, this alone would not tempt me to sign up. Professor Luckhurst does not see this as a problem.
“It’s a bloke package. This isn’t about appealing to all of the people all of the time. It’s about targeting something you can sell to a target demographic. It doesn’t mean The Sun won’t come up with something it can sell to its female readers with similar alacrity. If it gets one in 100 of its male readers to subscribe that will be a good result.”
Douglas McCabe, analyst at media research company Enders Analysis, is more cautious. He says: “Starting with the positive, it is the first subscription model I can think of from a national newspaper where the public has explicitly associated it with new, unique content. Generally, a paywall goes up and it is more of the same packaged in a different way. This explicitly includes additional content that was not available on the free model. I think overall that’s a very smart move.”
But he adds: “There are also lots of discount vouchers and packages. While these are attractive to families and females, the football content has got most of the coverage. It’s a very male-focused package. I wonder if one of the issues they will have is that they have packaged it in such a male way and there are lots of Sun readers who are female.”
Two months after launching, Sun+ has broadened its appeal to both sexes with the new Sun+ Lotto. The Sun’s Second Chance Sunday game allows Sun+ members to draw for free using the same numbers on their Saturday night National Lottery ticket, promising at least 50 prizes of £20,000 in its first month alone.
The numbers
The Sun is not revealing subscriber figures to date, but in August, the first month the title went behind a paywall, the number of visitors to the site fell significantly. According to the Tel Aviv-based web measurement site SimilarWeb, the number of visitors to TheSun.co.uk fell by 61.4 per cent, from 37.3m visits in July to 14.4m visits in August, and by a further 74.8 per cent compared to its pre-subscription visitors to just 9.4m visits in September. When The Times put up a paywall in July 2010, it lost 66 per cent of its market share, but The Sun might have been expected to fare better in an environment in which consumers have become more used to paying for access to content on the web. The site’s bounce rate – the number of visitors who click on the site, but then leave it without going on to access any further content – rose by 45 per cent, from 47.5 per cent in July to 68.9 per cent in August, dropping slightly to 67.4 per cent in September.
McCabe has estimated that Sun+ needs to sign up around 340,000 subscribers if it wants to emulate the £50m-a-year revenue that rival MailOnline currently makes through its hugely successful free-access, advertising-funded model. This is based on several assumptions, including estimating that around 70 per cent of digital income will come from subscriptions, as well as assuming that around half of subscriptions will come from in-app purchases from which Apple and Google cream off 30 per cent.
However, McCabe believes that News UK Chief Executive Mike Darcey, formerly Chief Operating Officer with BSkyB for 15 years, has the right approach. He says: “Newspaper businesses are not service focused enough. But that’s increasingly what Mike Darcey has. You don’t become chief operating officer at Sky without having a clear vision. It’s not just about content; it’s about how you package that content, appealing to different households depending on their tastes. Mike Darcey has brought that to News UK in a way that might not have been there otherwise.” McCabe warns that The Sun’s digital service will have to continue evolving to ensure that the number of visitors does not plateau.
For me, the best thing about subscribing to Sun+ so far has been the instant access to bite-sized news and gossip on my mobile phone. I have not been impressed by The Sun Classic tablet version of the newspaper, which is merely a difficult-to-read, slow-to-download version of the print newspaper.
And while Sun+ Perks has a female and family focus, including holidays for £9.50, restaurant meal deals, free apps and ebooks, cinema tickets and days out, I can’t help thinking Sun+ would do well to take on the hugely successful MailOnline by using its showbiz team to provide exclusive celebrity content.
Effect on print sales
There is also the question of the impact that charging for online access will have on the print circulation of The Sun, which has fallen by more than 9% in the last year and shows no sign of reversing that decline. In the first month of switching to an online subscription model, The Sun made use of new inkjet technology provided by Kodak to print a unique access code in every single copy, allowing readers to access the digital version for free. In subsequent months, readers have had to collect 20 codes to gain free access. Mike Darcey has said TheSun.co.uk went behind a paywall because it was “untenable to have 2.4 million paying 40p for the Sun at the same time as a bunch of other people [were] getting it for free”. But will those now paying £2 per week for the digital version of the newspaper stop spending £3.20 a week on the print edition?
McCabe warns: “There is some risk that The Sun could lose print sales at the newsstand as subscriptions through mobile devices are taken up. There are at present 124,000 daily website users who also read the print edition: asked simplistically, what if they reduced their frequency of print purchase as paying digital subscribers?”
Professor Luckhurst does not see this as a problem: “People buy the print product and digital product for different reasons. We are a very sophisticated audience in every part of the market and we consume mobile and tablet apps in a different way to how we consume newspapers. The Sun is a coffee break, share-it-with-your-friends product, but Sun+ is on the go.”
