“ONLY £2 a month on THIS DEAL NOW. Two days and counting” according to the spam which dropped into my inbox this morning from those plucky chappies at Manchester Confidential.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been a bit miffed, to say the least, at the sheer volume of spam ‘newsletters’ being pushed out since publisher Mark Garner decided that the entertainments blog was mostly going behind a paywall.
In what could be the biggest gamble of the entrepreneur’s life, from January 1, users are required to pay up for restaurant reviews, offers and competitions which were previously free of charge – although some stories will still be free to all.
Correction: As Garner notes below, the pay walls go into place on the 15th of the month; the current discounted deal finishes at the end of this month.
Being no stranger to the sort of online businesses which do make money (having previously run RedHotDutch for instance) Garner says he understands the digital world and he’s certainly been talking a good fight since he announced the plan.
Just last week he explained the extension of the subscription offer deadline until the end of this month as a way of helping people who felt overstretched due to Christmas after telling HowDo last month:
“We’ve never courted Google, never engaged in any SEO, so I think our readership figures are more robust than say the MEN’s online stats, or The Daily Mail with their countless millions of readers – ours generally don’t find us by accident – but there’s still fluff.
“What we hope to concentrate on is perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 key transactors – people that gain value from our site and our deals, and people that our advertisers want to engage with.
“We’re not frightened by losing the fluff.”
If you want to be a friend to the Manchester Confidential blog, the full details of what you’ll get for your £2 are right here.
Not long now until we find out whether there’s enough friends and heroes to go round and make a success of Manchester’s first media organisation paywall.
Dim Sum Digital 
Hi Sarah,
Thanks for following Gordo, he is flattered and currently preening himself in the bathroom. Just a slight correction to your very fair blog; The pay walls go into place on the 15th of the month; the current discounted deal finishes tomorrow evening
However, what has brought a massive flood of memories back for me is your link to the Independent Newspaper story back in 1993 about Red Hot Dutch. Of course you naughty journalists would never say that ‘Mark Garner made his first real money re-publishing The Sunday Times Complete Cookbook’ and after that several more of the same ilk. The ST Cookbook actually printed 118,000 hardbacks back in the eighties. The only chef who could compete with that today is maybe Jamie Oliver.
Red Hot, of which I am proud, was actually started to fund a bouquet of channels aimed primarily at food, which I believed was the *real* new pornography and over the next twenty years would expand hugely. I also believed that Murdoch was spot on with his vision of satellite/multi channels.
Both turned out to be right, but I finished up bankrupting myself with legal fees defending myself against John Major and the feller with the big gap in his front tooth, whom I can’t remember the name of. Both declared that Red Hot was unacceptable under the Tories ‘family values’ and that I should be jailed for showing naked people on telly, as that would turn the British males into a thriving mob of slathering rapists.
They chose to ignore the European Broadcasting Act which states that what was legal and licensed in one member state had to be legal and licensed in any of the others.
The first feller we now know to have been shagging that ugly female MP whilst the second was having his toes sucked by an out of work actress at the time. I never got sent to the nick, but finished up skint yet once again, scotching my plans for the ‘Hot Cooking’ channels.
Ho hum.
As to pay walls, Murdoch and his son are right once again in my opinion. It’s pretty simple, how are you, or any professional journalist, going to pay the rent? There are simply not enough advertising dollars in the world to cover it. The Internet free trial is over, and if you want your profession to prosper, then you need to get behind it. Or, brush up on your burger flipping skills.
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Hi Sarah,
Thanks for following Gordo, he is flattered and currently preening himself in the bathroom. Just a slight correction to your very fair blog; The pay walls go into place on the 15th of the month; the current discounted deal finishes tomorrow evening
However, what has brought a massive flood of memories back for me is your link to the Independent Newspaper story back in 1993 about Red Hot Dutch. Of course you naughty journalists would never say that ‘Mark Garner made his first real money re-publishing The Sunday Times Complete Cookbook’ and after that several more of the same ilk. The ST Cookbook actually printed 118,000 hardbacks back in the eighties. The only chef who could compete with that today is maybe Jamie Oliver.
Red Hot, of which I am proud, was actually started to fund a bouquet of channels aimed primarily at food, which I believed was the *real* new pornography and over the next twenty years would expand hugely. I also believed that Murdoch was spot on with his vision of satellite/multi channels.
Both turned out to be right, but I finished up bankrupting myself with legal fees defending myself against John Major and the feller with the big gap in his front tooth, whom I can’t remember the name of. Both declared that Red Hot was unacceptable under the Tories ‘family values’ and that I should be jailed for showing naked people on telly, as that would turn the British males into a thriving mob of slathering rapists.
They chose to ignore the European Broadcasting Act which states that what was legal and licensed in one member state had to be legal and licensed in any of the others.
The first feller we now know to have been shagging that ugly female MP whilst the second was having his toes sucked by an out of work actress at the time. I never got sent to the nick, but finished up skint yet once again, scotching my plans for the ‘Hot Cooking’ channels.
Ho hum.
As to pay walls, Murdoch and his son are right once again in my opinion. It’s pretty simple, how are you, or any professional journalist, going to pay the rent? There are simply not enough advertising dollars in the world to cover it. The Internet free trial is over, and if you want your profession to prosper, then you need to get behind it. Or, brush up on your burger flipping skills.
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Oh yes; on reading your piece once more, I could be a bit miffed at your description of our mailing as Spam. Spam, apart from anything else, is where one receives mailing unsolicited and you must have signed yourself up to receive the mancon mailings; we operate under the European standards even though they are not yet law, we are one of the very few ‘white labelled’ mailers here in the UK and our mailing lists build at the rate of over 1000 every month, all from word of mouth.
Just thought I would let you know 😉
Off for a bacon buttie now, Axons award winning home cured best back. Yum.
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Come now, you must admit the frequency of newsletters has been quite remarkable of late. Enjoy the spam-free buttie!
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Oh yes; on reading your piece once more, I could be a bit miffed at your description of our mailing as Spam. Spam, apart from anything else, is where one receives mailing unsolicited and you must have signed yourself up to receive the mancon mailings; we operate under the European standards even though they are not yet law, we are one of the very few ‘white labelled’ mailers here in the UK and our mailing lists build at the rate of over 1000 every month, all from word of mouth.
Just thought I would let you know 😉
Off for a bacon buttie now, Axons award winning home cured best back. Yum.
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He means David Mellor. Maybe he should write a book about his experiences with Red Dutch “How to Lose Money in the Porn Industry” would surely be a winner… agree with you Sarah that even legitimate mailers end up acting like spam when they’re too regular (hello, Amazon.)
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He means David Mellor. Maybe he should write a book about his experiences with Red Dutch “How to Lose Money in the Porn Industry” would surely be a winner… agree with you Sarah that even legitimate mailers end up acting like spam when they’re too regular (hello, Amazon.)
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You can’t tell if you don’t sell!
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Actually, You can’t sell if you don’t tell… oops
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Actually, You can’t sell if you don’t tell… oops
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Now there’s something-defending porn channels as a way of cross subsidising food writing .
MR Garner,paywalls will only work if you have a premium product to sell in the first place hence why so few succeed.
MUrdoch has yet to prove that they work ,apart from at the WSJ,see above,and journalism will only survive ultimately in a free to enter Market not when it is exclusive
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Now there’s something-defending porn channels as a way of cross subsidising food writing .
MR Garner,paywalls will only work if you have a premium product to sell in the first place hence why so few succeed.
MUrdoch has yet to prove that they work ,apart from at the WSJ,see above,and journalism will only survive ultimately in a free to enter Market not when it is exclusive
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Fortune favours the brave Nigel.
Now, since the first markets were established on the banks of the Euphrates river nine thousand years ago, people have charged others for their work. Not once in that time has anyone expected something for nothing. The Internet has simply been a free trial. How can any writer, apart from bloggers who do it for fun (and 9999 out of 10,000 are so crap no-one will read them) do it without payment? Don’t say advertising for god’s sake. How will a journalist pay for his three month stay in Bagdad, or the next area for strife, the Yemen? It is critical to democracy that we find out the truth and that comes from the people themselves being prepared to pay a couple of pounds to support the work of the journalist.
It is just naive to make the statement you just made. A way for fair payment has to, and will, be found to ensure the fourth estate thrives, regardless of the printing press and distribution system of the future.
Trust funds have a habit of running out you know.
As to my defence of pornography; I am worn out with the debate, it’s been going on for seventen years, but this is a letter published back in 1993 in the January of that year in The Independant which best sums up my views:
Sir: The Rt Rev David Sheppard (Letters, 25 January) appeals for the explicit pornography of the Red Hot Dutch satellite television channel to be banned in Britain ‘as an expression of the shared values on which we want our society to be based’ and according to the ‘laws and regulations’ of ‘this country’ which ‘define what is decent and permissible in the light of our own moral and spiritual beliefs’.
One of the shared values and moral beliefs of many people in this country is that what consenting adults wish to do or hear or see in private is their own business, however unpleasant or indecent or offensive it may be, and that it should not be the subject of laws or regulations imposed by other people.
In such a case and from such a perspective, what should prevail is not the emotional dogmatism of the minority, stimulated by the mass media and the religious establishment, but the personal freedom of individuals who only wish to mind their own business.
Yours faithfully,
NICOLAS WALTER
London, N1
25 January
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Fortune favours the brave Nigel.
Now, since the first markets were established on the banks of the Euphrates river nine thousand years ago, people have charged others for their work. Not once in that time has anyone expected something for nothing. The Internet has simply been a free trial. How can any writer, apart from bloggers who do it for fun (and 9999 out of 10,000 are so crap no-one will read them) do it without payment? Don’t say advertising for god’s sake. How will a journalist pay for his three month stay in Bagdad, or the next area for strife, the Yemen? It is critical to democracy that we find out the truth and that comes from the people themselves being prepared to pay a couple of pounds to support the work of the journalist.
It is just naive to make the statement you just made. A way for fair payment has to, and will, be found to ensure the fourth estate thrives, regardless of the printing press and distribution system of the future.
Trust funds have a habit of running out you know.
As to my defence of pornography; I am worn out with the debate, it’s been going on for seventen years, but this is a letter published back in 1993 in the January of that year in The Independant which best sums up my views:
Sir: The Rt Rev David Sheppard (Letters, 25 January) appeals for the explicit pornography of the Red Hot Dutch satellite television channel to be banned in Britain ‘as an expression of the shared values on which we want our society to be based’ and according to the ‘laws and regulations’ of ‘this country’ which ‘define what is decent and permissible in the light of our own moral and spiritual beliefs’.
One of the shared values and moral beliefs of many people in this country is that what consenting adults wish to do or hear or see in private is their own business, however unpleasant or indecent or offensive it may be, and that it should not be the subject of laws or regulations imposed by other people.
In such a case and from such a perspective, what should prevail is not the emotional dogmatism of the minority, stimulated by the mass media and the religious establishment, but the personal freedom of individuals who only wish to mind their own business.
Yours faithfully,
NICOLAS WALTER
London, N1
25 January
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