Ireland.com/IrishTimes.com – The revival (hopefully) of wasted assets.

Finally, Ireland.com (the online home of the Irish Times) is getting a revamp and is abandoning its subscription model. Someone at the Irish Times has rightly come to the conclusion that unbuckling Ireland.com from it’s subscription service is the best way to leverage the Ireland.com and Irish Times brands online.

I don’t know what was the turning point for the Irish Times decision; a fractured business model with reportedly less than 10,000 subscribers, a realization that these great brands had alienated loads of potential traffic and had no way of generating significant advertising euros or whether they started listening to the stories from their newspaper colleagues in the US and heard in horror about the troubles of an industry that is on the ropes because of digitization.

Maybe it was a combination of reasons but whatever the catalyst the reversal is coming none too soon.

It was an act of genius to buy the Ireland.com domain back in the early days of the Internet and tie the “Ireland brand” with the distinguished Irish “paper of record” brand that the Irish Times is know for. I don’t think that anyone could have foreseen the importance of tying the brands together in the digital world. A search for “Ireland” brings up Ireland.com on the on 1st page of the natural results despite the fact that they have hidden most of the content behind a walled garden. The Ireland.com domain alone secures that position.

It buying Ireland.com was the smartest “adapting to the digital age” decision made by the Irish Times, putting up a toll to view the site’s content was the stupidest. I get a feeling that those at the Irish Times don’t fully appreciate the powerful asset that they have in their possession. By associating the Ireland.com brand with the Irish Times they have assured that they are ever prominent when people search for Ireland potentially killing all the other Irish news outlets in the search results. But they can only maintain and build upon this association if they develop the site and allow the search engines and its readers to access the content, link to it and leverage the massive distribution vehicle of the Internet

Maybe there were some rational business logic to establish a subscription model (back in 2003) when the online ad industry was in retreat but with the hyper-growth of Internet advertising in the ensuing years, it has not made any sense for many years. The question is, why did they wait 5 years to change course.

If there are still any delusions on the wisdom of setting Ireland.com free just cast an eye on what is happening to the US newspaper industry. This year is “taking shape as their worst on record” with projected ad declines of 15%. This is on top of the 8% decline last year. Even the venerable NYT reported their biggest a decline of 13%. This is an an industry on the ropes, ad declines, layoffs, and much soul searching on what comes next. Business Week media analyst, Joe Fine, sums it up with the headline The Daily Shrinking Planet and is predicting that “one or more major American markets will lose their daily newspaper within 18 months”.

Digital is transforming the newspaper industry in the same way that it transformed the music industry – in summation classified and brand advertising are following the readers online while costs (print, paper, transport) are skyrocketing. The Irish Times may look back at the early years of the 21st century with nostalgia as the last hooray for the traditional print only business fueled by the growth in employment, a national obsession with buying and selling property and ever rising incomes that could afford the 2 euro price tag (this is over $3, an unthinkable amount for a daily US newspaper).

They may have been insulated from the declining print revenues impacting the US newspaper industry but all this will change in the coming years. The Irish Times must focus all its energies on developing the Ireland.com and Irishtimes.com brands. The first step is setting the content free. That is the easy part. The difficult part will be monetizing the online brands and determining how the online business will compensate for the coming declines in the traditional print revenues.