The Irish Times is set to be free on the internet from Monday. The move is part of a relaunch which will see the company use the name and address IrishTimes.com as the central online brand for the newspaper.

The relaunch, which comes less than two years after the last
redesign, will use more linking to internal and external pages and it
will allow for the addition of "many multimedia features". The new
design looks more like a standard modern newspaper website.

As with other newspapers’ moves to free access, the ‘paywal’ will
remain for older content. While it created revenue from subscriptions,
page impressions were at 15m in 2006 from 25m before the pay model was
introduced.

The installation of the paywall in the first place now looks to been
questionable. You could say hindsight is great, but the model hasn’t
looked the best for a while. The way openness and linking drives
traffic is key here, and you’re far more likely to have people link to
a non-subscription page (thus increasing viewers and page impressions,
thus making advertising more attractive).
 

"In 2002,
www.ireland.com was
the most successful website in Ireland by standard media metrics, with
25 million audited page impressions per month and 2.5 million unique
users. Later that year, like many other newspapers, we turned to a
subscription model to provide a revenue stream" said Geraldine Kennedy, the editor of the Irish Times, today when writing about the changes.

However, she fails to point out the massive fall in impressions
after the paywall was installed in 2002. "Traffic plunged, from 25m
page impressions pre subscription to 6.5m page impressions" according to the Guardian’s Organ Grinder. Una O’Hare of Ireland.com told WAN’s
World Digital Publishing Conference & Expo in 2006 that page
impressions had only partly recovered to 15m in the same year. The free
breaking news in the last year and this relaunch should point things in
the right direction.

On the question of making the internet pay, O’Hare said: "The answer
from Ireland.com is absolutely yes". Although it should be noted that
Kennedy was less sure about this on national radio recently. She said
the site was struggling to break even. 

Also conflicting is the 50,000 subscribers mentioned at the WAN conference two years ago and 8,000 to 10,000 Kennedy spoke of on RTE radio earlier this year. So, what’s with the gap of 40,000 in just two years?

Strangely, Kennedy writing today uses the same quote from the Irish Times Trust’s Memoranda and Articles as we did previously to criticise the paywall. She says IrishTimes.com will also be covered under their mandate to "to publish
The Irish Times
as an independent newspaper primarily concerned with serious issues for
the benefit of the community throughout the whole of Ireland, free from
any form of personal or party political, commercial, religious or other
sectional control".