The Times of London has spent years behind a hard paywall and with roughly 680,000 loyal digital subscribers, it has little reason to regret it. Now it wants the readers who’d pay for a single guide or moment but never the whole paper. Just don’t call it micropayments. Director of subscriptions Abs Ahmed has another name for it.
He called it “macro payments,” a term he said was coined in New York while he was meeting with News Corp business units. Micropayments charge readers a little for each article. Macro payments sell something specific, such as one of the Times’ annual guides, at the moment a reader wants it. Ahmed described the work as “creating and identifying moments of value and moments of need, and monetizing that.” Where the Times can hold its own, he wants it to “effectively be able to charge a premium.”
Exactly what that premium looks like is still up for grabs.
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