Asia One
Heading for charges?
Readers wonder why they have to register; here's a likely reason. By Seah Chiang Nee.
Nov 8, 2004

Immediately after the revamp of The Straits Times, Singapore Press Holdings, its parent company, imposed control on readers of its Internet arm, AsiaOne.com.

The website, one of Asia's most heavily visited portals, remains free, but visitors would first have to register. At last count some 120,000 have reportedly done so.

The sudden move caught hundreds of thousands of surfers at home and abroad by surprise, and their rush to sign up resulted in a virtual breakdown for days, evoking cries of anguish.

Some readers resented it and lashed out, threatening to stop reading it but the process gradually settled down.

AsiaOne hosts and markets the online editions of The Straits Times, Business Times, New Paper, STREATS, Lianhe Zaobao, Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu.

It commands 120 million page views per month, a third of them log on to the Chinese language Lianhe Zaobao (the majority from China and other Chinese communities).

This popularity has, however, never been matched by profits. Firstly, readers from mainland China were just getting a free ride, bringing in few advertising advantages.

Worse still, the free website is contributing to the circulation stagnation The Straits Times itself. Requiring visitors to register is evidently an effort to tap more revenue from the website.

Registration is not unusual. Major publications including The New York Times, South China Morning Post and Bangkok Post, require it.

AsiaOne is following suit for obvious reasons. Online advertising, once regarded as a poor stepsister, is now considered as having brighter prospects.

Advertisers assess a website's attractiveness by the number of visits and page reads as well as its readership base. Apart from that its databank of names is also a potential asset, too.

SPH operates all Singapore's newspapers, except TODAY, and therefore controls access to virtually all their readers.

Online charges?

But apart from an expected advertising push, the registration move could be a prelude to charging online readers, both at home and in China.

This could happen if The Straits Times were to continue losing circulation to its interactive edition.

Declining newspapers are a global trend.

Young Singaporeans are also dropping out of Straits Times in growing numbers despite its monopoly, because of the availability of other sources like TV news and the Internet.

Singapore is a cabled city with more than half the population having Internet access, many of them on an unlimited basis. The newspaper slide could well continue into the future.

Editors call it cannibalization, the free online version eating into the mother ship.

Registration gives SPH the option in future to charge visitors to The Straits Times Interactive unless they subscribe to the physical paper. Technically, it can be done.

That will probably be a last resort when it has to face this prospect and reducing the coverage of Straits Times Interactive to force readers to buy the newspaper.

Besides Lianhe Zaobao - with 40 million visits a month - could produce an attractive source of revenue from China if an effective payment system can be devised.

Even if it captures only 10-15 per cent of this total, it would be a worthwhile venture.

It is time SPH prove itself capable of earning money from abroad.

The loss of S$300 million in the past four years of media rivalry (with the actual or proposed closure of a TV channel and two newspapers) has shown up its failure to compete. Some critics attribute it to its history of monopoly.

SPH already has experience in online subscription.

As a defensive step, The Business Times - which sells for 85 cents a copy - offers web subscriptions at S$15 for three months, $28 for 6 months and $48 for a year.

The paper's circulation has declined by 15 per cent in 18 months.

Will The Straits Times and Lianhe Zaobao follow in this subscription formula?
By Seah Chiang Nee