Murdoch's Pay Wall is Acting Like the Old Berlin Wall...

...no one wants in.

There have been only 15,000 paid subscribers plus another 12,500 iPad subscriptions to Murdoch's London Times.

Henry Blodgett calculates what this means in revenue for the Times if subscriptions grow to the very unlikely number of 150,000:

But if we're charitable and assume that the 15,000 online subs and 12,500 iPad subs grow to include the 150,000 folks who have registered (unlikely), this still would not produce a big revenue base.

At 2 pounds a week, the average online subscriber would produce 100 pounds of revenue a year. 150,000 of them would produce 15 million pounds of revenue.

15 million pounds of revenue would be nice for a company used to living on, say, $5 million of revenue. But it wouldn't even begin to offset the cost of the Times' huge newsroom.

Meanwhile, what has the new paywall done to online traffic? So far, it has dropped by two-thirds. That, apparently, is actually better than expected. One editor feared it would collapse by 90%.