Paywall removed, moving to IrishTimes.com, Ireland.com to become a portal.
Via Eoin and a really shitty press release comes news that the Irish Times are going online and are moving domain for the freeness to IrishTimes.com and keeping Ireland.com for premium stuff. The last bit is a little stupid really. All those links with “Irish Times” are now going to Ireland.com which is going to become a “portal” on all things Ireland. Great…
The Irish Times will publish on the web under its own title online from Monday morning with the launch of a new site, www.irishtimes.com. The site will be free to access by readers.
The move to irishtimes.com is designed to make the newspaper the dominant media website in Ireland in the 21st century. The change from a subscription model to a free newspaper on irishtimes.com is a further instalment in the biggest editorial development programme in the history of the newspaper embarked upon last February with the redesign and modernisation of The Irish Times and the launch of new supplements.
…
The new ireland.com will combine relevant content across a range of channels, local services and search functionality in a manner that has not been seen in Ireland before. The new site is aimed at Irish internet users or people elsewhere with an interest in Ireland and all things Irish.
Here’s what I predicted at the start of the year, so more to do:
The Irish Times will open up
While some won’t want to see the paymodel go away after defending it for years, the paywalls at the Irish Times will fall away and traffic will go up and up, making this quality paper rightly go up in rankings for all things Ireland. The Irish Times will internally consider buying Beaut.ie or asking Kieran Murphy from IceCreamIreland to do a weekly piece for their food and lifestyle blog. Nothing might happen though.
I’m hearing I’m going to be wrong on the blogs. They’re still greatly disliked in there.
Anyway, overall fantastic news, lets see how these stats look in two months.
Hah! Got it out before the lot of ya!
Fascinating analysis of the situation as regards Irish newspapers and other media. From what I can see The Guardian’s Comment Is Free looks the most like a blog of all the newspaper offerings and I imagine that they get a hell of a lot of worldwide traffic. The Irish Times in particular should learn from this.
I am delighted the Irish Times will be free as I know that many people like myself only read the Indo because it is free so I am pretty sure I will be reading the Times more often now.
So I wonder if this means I’ll get my €79 back? I just paid a couple of weeks ago!
Good news, long overdue. I just hope they include more photos on the new site. There are far too few photos on ireland.com
Now, if they only made the print version Berliner size.
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About bloody time!
The idea of moving the newspaper content to a new domain and repurposing the old domain, instead of simply 30x-redirecting it, is pretty stupid though. Way to lose all that Page Rank….
I could never understand why they used ireland.com in the first place when they had the possibility to be at irishtimes dot whatever.
So who else was lucky enough to get the shitty press release?
The one attached to the email with all the recipients in the To: field.
Yep, also the one with nothing in the email other than the signature footer.
From the agency that use yahoo.co.uk for their email.
@Damien – if you don’t start a business and show these people how it should be done I’m going to shoot you 😉
Finally!
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Just goes to prove what everyone already knew – people won’t pay for content online, especially if an equivalent is freely available elsewhere. I wonder will they continue to charge for email -that was such a shame as I liked having an ireland.com email address, but certainly wasn’t prepared to pay.
haha, I never saw that particular prediction! The year is half over and they haven’t bought us yet – they’d best get their skates on, is all I can say, or we might have to start considering those Daily Mail offers*.
*that’s a complete and utter total made-up lie, by the way
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