The Times of London is gearing up to test ‘macro payments’

Exactly what that premium looks like is still up for grabs.

“There’s no ready-made solution,” Ahmed said on stage at a Digiday event, though testing is due to start in the next couple of months. 

Where the push into the macro payments starts is a little clearer. The Times’ annual guides, such as the rich list and best places, are where Ahmed sees an opening. “These are things that hold intrinsic value for those audiences,” he said. “People turn up for them but “they don’t want a subscription, he continued. “That’s not what they’re after,” said Ahmed. “They’re after that package and what we feel is there’s an opportunity in that space.”

Football fans hoping to buy their club’s coverage on its own this way are out of luck. When asked whether a Liverpool FC could use micropayments just for that, Ahmed said “it’s not disaggregating content.” 

The U.K. looks like the first stop for these packages, though Ahmed said nothing is confirmed. The publisher has scale there and is a primary read for much of its audience. How they will actually pay, however, is still up in the air, with The Times weighing a day pass against a week.

It has a much firmer handle on who those people are. Its research found a significant occasional audience and “over three quarters” of those people “would find a kind of flexible access more appealing to them,” Ahmed said. These readers are “not looking for everything at this moment in time,” and are “not cannibalizing what otherwise would have come through the door,” Ahmed added. In the best case they go on to “become a loyal Times subscriber and stay with us for years and years,” Ahmed continued. If they never get there, he still sees value in keeping them close through events, podcasts and the rest of the publisher’s ecosystem.

Whatever The Times tests still has to answer the subscription business. Ahmed said there is always a financial consideration around the existing subscription model whenever the publisher tries a new concept. Ultimately, keeping subscribers sweet comes first. Macro payments has to complement that as another piece of a business its building for a world where traffic won’t hold up. Ahmed said more than 50% of web traffic is now bots and crawlers, while the social and search referrals publishers grew up on have thinned. Like many of his peers, he doesn’t expect them to come back. On top of that, he said, shifts in consumer behavior and regulation are squeezing subscription businesses that might once have relied on that traffic to grow.

“Publishers have long sought a smaller unit of payment that captures willingness to pay without requiring a full subscription,” said Abi Watson at Enders. “However, they have to thread the needle between getting people to pay who might never take out a full subscription, and avoiding cannibalizing their base. The Times, in particular, has traditionally maintained a hard paywall. Charging for, say, annual guides, is consistent with that strategy.”

Micropayments need not apply

Wherever macropayments end up, The Times has no plans to take the road toward macropayments. Ahmed said the publisher has looked at them in different ways over the last 10 years, “and it’s never really landed that well.” Other publishers are finding success with it,” he acknowledged, “but for us, it’s not.”

He’s blunt about why. “It’s like having people come through your door and read and consume content with a taxi meter going on,” Ahmed said. Readers under that model feel they need to “self moderate” and The Times wants them engaged.

AI is already earning its keep

The subscriptions team has some AI results to show for their endeavors. Synthetic audiences have let The Times put out 10 times as much research, which Ahmed said has helped the team move faster. AI decisioning tools that serve the right email or in-product message at the right time have delivered “multiple increases in conversion, particularly around our lapsed audiences.” In performance marketing, a tool called Smartly has cut cost per acquisition by more than 55%, he said. 

All that tooling is scrambling who does what. Ahmed said the old lines between teams are blurring and The Times wants people working beyond their current remits so good ideas for experiments don’t stall. How the teams use AI is shaped by News Corp’s global policies, which Amhed said give that usage structure. The Times sticks to them. 

Meeting readers where they are

Ahmed said The Times plans to show up where its audiences already spend time, with more short-form video fronted by its talent and newsletters on Substack, then bring those readers back to its own properties. Events that once fit on the top floor of its London Bridge offices keep getting bigger. The Times also wants to reach multi-platform audiences who are younger, skew slightly more female and don’t tend to stick with a long-term subscription, and it has already done work in sport, fashion and luxury. To be clear, “younger” is relative on a paper this established. Ahmed put it at about 35 to 45-years-old. He added: “I’m not going to presume that we’re going to have 18, 19-year-olds come through the door tomorrow.”