azeem.azhar

Is The Times paywall working?

The Observer today reports on a significant drop in The Times’ traffic since the launch of its paywall.
The Experian data it reports is much richer and shows the following data:

• Overall drop in visits of 66%
• Linger time drops from 5 minutes to 3.5 minutes

The question is–and not touched on–in the Observer piece is whether this is a good or bad outcome.

It’s early days to make a call. But my judgement:

• Linger time for people who don’t bounce off the paywall has probably increased. Times probably has a much larger number of people seeing one page only (the paybarrier).
• The drop in visits it far lower than I would have expected. The net sentiment was that a drop would be precitipitous–like 95% or more. To have only seen a drop of 60 or 70% actually leaves traffic at The Times an order of magnitude higher than some predictions.

The Times was seeing about 20m visits a month, call it 5m unique users per month. If conversion rates to paid are really running at 33% (with a 66% of traffic declining), then the times will be looking at 1.5m subscriptions. At the promotion rate of £1 for 30 days, that works out at £1.5m in revenues.

If they hold on to 50% of those users after the initial trial, then they’ll run to 750k subs at £100 per year or £75m a year.

If they hold on to 10%, then it is a paltry £15m a year.

Replete with assumptions but it shows the fine balance. At 750k paying subscribers, the subscription revenue, together with higher advertising yields might become material.

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• Early Indications Say Paywall For The Times Is A Dreadful Failure (techdirt.com)

Popularity: 10% [?]

Yes, I am jumping into the politics bandwagon, a bit late.

Would we really have ended up with 12 BNP MPs under a system of PR?

No. Systems of PR can be designed badly, to engineer terrible outcomes. Or they can be designed well.

Generally you have thresholds below which a party gets no seats. Israel which is the most Proportional of all in the sense that it has a single constituency nationally and only a 2% threshold.

Even in the hyper-permissive Israeli system (which i not what the Lb Dem’s would propose), BNP would fall below the 2% threshold and get nothing. Generally fewer than a dozen parties get seats in the Knesset as a result.

We are more likely to have a model of with STV across larger constituencies (with trigger thresholds) or the additional member system which is used most famously in Germany at federal level; and is similar to the system used for Scottish and Welsh and other elections.

In this model, you have two types of seats. 300 MPs come from constitutencies and 300 from party lists. & two votes. Say Party A polls 40% of Vote and B polls 25% of vote; but in the constituency contests (which are FPTP, but could also be STV), they end up with 60% of seats; i.e 180 seats from constituencies.The second vote then goes to the party lists– but is balanced to ensure that any skew from FPTP on the constituency seats is somehwat corrected.

In Germany there is a trigger threshold of 5% below which you get no representation. This tends to keep the freaks out.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

We’ve been working on our noise filters at Viewsflow, hunting down ‘bad’ Twitter accounts the look good. This afternoon’s exercise left me relatively surprised at how bot-rich Twitter is. Looking at a couple of hundred accounts which were regularly sharing high quality links, we found these (approximate) proportions:

Now I figured there were a lot of bots on Twitter but what is clear that there are a lot of bots on Twitter, reposting content from feeds of various sites. Broadly speaking there appeared to be three different types

1. Republishing feeds which slice and dice other feeds in, presumably, interesting ways – make up a tiny minority; one might assume their is a segment of the audience interested in them.
2. Out-and-out megaphones: Twitter accounts which pull off reliable sources, like the WSJ or FT rss feed, and ping meticulously on the hour
3. ‘Social media experts’: You can tell by their twitter backgrounds (with the phone numbers on the left), who appear to be part of some mutual back linking exercise. They are 90% retweet, some smartly trying to retweet what looks like a Google Alerts feed, and 10% ‘thanks for following’.

Twitter is spotting rogue accounts. A couple of accounts (not shown in the pie chart had been suspended by Twitter).
The most popular Twitter clients were for the bot accounts were twitterfeed and Hootsuite.
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Popularity: 22% [?]

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the response. Couple of points:
On the Harrison Ford quote on my blog, where I originally posted this, I attributed to the quote to Harrison Ford. When @mikebutcher asked me to post this on TC:UK, I thought I’d better do some fact checking (happens occasionally) and the provenance of the quote ended up being in dispute, or maybe I thought a picture of Leia was more suited for TC:UK.

As someone whose entrepreneurial achievements I have a tremendous amount of respect for (‘It’s the van Somerens’ was often muttered in kow-towed tones by attendees of First Tuesdays back in the wild west), the thing that surprises me about your note is that it sounds incrementalist.
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Popularity: 37% [?]

This is a truly awesome post, which I recommend anyone interested in entrepreneurship should take a look at.

There is a great quote I came by from an HBS entrpreneurship professor (I forget the source). Entrepreneurship is “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”.

In order to do that, you do need to score strongly on Mark Suster’s 12 criteria.

And if you look at some of his criteria its clear that that are determinants could be driven by what happens in utero.
Take for example risk taking in high-frequency financial trading which can be predicted by the second-to-fourh digit ratio on a hand (http://bit.ly/ce15Bb). Coates et al point to prenatal androgens (i.e. testosterone levels in the womb) as having important organizing effects in the brain, resulting in different adult behaviours.

And as you point out, the effects are not linear or totally deterministic.
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Popularity: 26% [?]

Sixty per cent of my time is spent with customers, forty per cent with investors, thirty per cent with my team and thirty per cent doing work. The result is a busy schedule made easier by these ten great products.

1. Pzizz on iPhone : totally essential. Pzizz is a power napping application which I have been using since it was an app on the Mac

Builds unique sleep environments, allow for refreshing 15 minute power naps during the day. Sadly usually only have time for one every other day.

2. Docscanner on iPhone : constantly running around, so you never have the paper work you need when you are near a fax or scanner. And vice-versa. Docscanner takes better than average photos of documents and then allows you to transform them into scans that are acceptable to lawyers and bankers.
3. Berghaus Extrem Incinerator Duvet: London has been freezing these past two months, and I have done much more walking and running around in this wet, snowy city than I would like. My Incinerator Duvet jacked has kept me warm and dry. Plus doubles as an sensory-isolation chamber during power naps. (You need to see it to believe it.)
4. Quaker porridge oats : Eaten on most mornings to get me through to at least eleven am.
5. Sharemyplaylists : Great for finding a suitable playlist for late night working sessions. Something laid back for writing presentations, some more thumping for building a training set for one of our modules.
6. Dropbox : Just have to add my entrepreneur love for Dropbox.
7. Xpad : Very simple Mac App for keeping scratch notes. Autosaves, but sadly doesn’t sync easily across Dropbox.
8. Chartbeat / Analytics App / Server Density : three apps that help us stay on top of our site performance and uptime. Chartbeat has become completely essential, but Analytics App which is an iPhone app for grabbing headling Google Analytics data during the day. David Mytton’s server density is a useful Nagios-as-a-service.
9. Blackberry Bold : Great device for writing emails, to dos and tweets, while carrying a laptop bag in the order hand. Unlike my iPhone I can pretty much navigate this with one hand, while walking/running. It also functions really well in 2G mode, giving me better-than-odds chance of reaching 10pm with a mobile phone that still has batteries.
10. iPhone tethering: When it works, money saving. No more £10 trips to Starbucks just to pull a presentation or check something online.

Number 11 … of course there is a number 11.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

Lots of people have helped us in our journey to build the world’s database of professional expertise. To name but a few, by their twitter handles: @robinklein, @rayyans, @nauiokaspark, @wdavc, @eileentso, @quixotic, @moia, @umairh, @aainslie, @harikunzru, @julien51, @philiphotchkiss, @marklittlewood to name but a few.

And I thought it might be worth accounting for my government’s help in our entrepreneurial journey:

• Education: Of our (extended team) of eight, I am the only one educated in the UK. And then my degree (PPE at Oxford) is of tangential relevance. The others, whether on the development, product management or knowledge engineering side,  have been educated in Europe, Canada, US and Australia.
• Company support: HMGs input so far has been to send me constant reminders to file my 363, now threatening to strike us off the company record. Yep, we’re a 13 month old company with £6k in revenues, and you want my 363 already? Should I spend time filing it ahead of working out the global licensing agreement framework with X Megacorp? Or reviewing the latest developer release of the iPhone app? Or indeed writing this blog post?
• Taxation: HMG has also been kind enough to pester us with VAT returns every quarter. From a cashflow standpoint this is fine because I have a few refunds, but in reality that puny cashflow doesn’t matter a jot to our business right now. And anyway, you sent me a cheque rather than making a direct bank transfer, because obviously waiting in a queue is the best use of my time.
• EIS: thanks for the EIS relief, although I have to confess that less than 10% of the capital we raised was eligible for EIS relief. The paperwork is absurdly complicated both for submission and for the forms themselves. Why make it this complex, when it could be simple and allow me to spend more time on–I don’t know–talking to lead customers.
• Employee options: Yep. It’s really important to incentivise employees. And thank god one of my cofounders had  trained as a solicitor. And we still had to iterate the forms three times.
• Enterprise finance guarantee: To misquote Harrison Ford, ‘You can put up the website for it, but you sure as hell can’t get the banks to lend’

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Popularity: 32% [?]

Techcrunch’s piece on venture returns seemed a little optimistic to me when I read it. And @cdixon agreed–pointing to the Calpers data which I have used before.

What is good about Calpers CEV program is that it is a massive program of investment into VC funds. While it misses many of the locked-up super-stellar West Coast VCs (like Sequoia), it is a fair bet that Calpers is a choice LP for many VC funds.

As a caveat to my analysis: I am not a trained financial analyst, so this is best efforts. Since I don’t have the dates of either draw downs and disbursements, I can’t calculate precise IRRs. Someone with more time could build a probabilistic model of this, if  you need.

Headline numbers: Calpers put $3bn into CEV from 1999 to mid-2009. By that point, the net value (in terms of cash paid out and the book value of investments held) was $2.86bn, representing an overall loss of 6.4%. J-curve affects aside, this suggests that venture has returned less than zero over the past decade.

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Popularity: 87% [?]

The iPad is a beautifully pitched complement the Apple’s suite of products, which we may consider as Desktop, Laptop, Mobile and media centre devices.

In my own use cases, there were clearly situations where the iPad would better perform than one of the other devices, and virtually all of these use cases are in the home. Here are the four use cases where we currently struggle with an appropriate device.

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Popularity: 36% [?]

Michael Liebreich, the hyper-focussed, high energy founder of New Energy Finance, has scored an impressive deal: being acquired by Bloomberg. Over the past six years, with incredible creativity and discipline, he has build a fantastic business–the number one player–in covering the new energy, cleantech and green energy markets.

Michael was kind enough to let me get involved in New Energy Finance as a small investor. And from the sidelines I was able to watch incredibly disciplined execution, a relentless focus on building a superb team and the best investor communications I have ever seen. And all this with a comparative modicum of external funding (compared to, say, Spinvox) and no VC involvement.

Well done NEF!

Popularity: 39% [?]