Morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Esther.

Ten years of the Times digital paywall: How Murdoch's 'big gamble' paid off — www.pressgazette.co.uk

In 2010, the consensus was that "nobody would pay" for general interest news. So the Times launched an ambitious paywall - what we call a 'hard' paywall today - in a move which set it apart from rivals. "This might seem obvious now, but it is only with hindsight that we see that we were years ahead of our rivals," says editor John Witherow.

Press Gazette takes a look at the Times' journey over the past decade and what the experiment has shown. Also of interest is a tweet from Robert Andrews, who polled Times readers back in 2010 to ask if they would pay. "Current subscriber count would seem to equate to about 5% of its free audience at the time," he said, but of course digital is now the majority of the publisher's revenue. Scale alone doesn't pay the bills.

P.S. We spoke to Alan Hunter in 2018 about the paywall when the Times met their milestone of 500,000 subscribers. Listen here.

New Zealand's Stuff newspaper group joins Facebook boycott as 'experiment' — www.theguardian.com

Stuff is New Zealand's largest newspaper group. They've 'paused' their relationship with Facebook and Instagram, directing staff to stop posting breaking news and stories to those platforms immediately. I love the sentiment behind it, but unfortunately given how little Zuck values news content, this won't even make him blink and is likely to disadvantage publishers more. In related news, some of the brands who said they'd boycott FB are still very much advertising on the platform...

Sex toy sales are up and publishers are seeing an opportunity to grasp — digiday.com

Retailers struggle to advertise sex toys due to restrictions on social platforms, so publishers like BuzzFeed and The Strategist have stepped in and are seeing some real success. BuzzFeed have reported that sex toy sales were up nearly 600% compared to April 2019 as the pandemic kept people apart. Spotting a trend like this and being uh...well positioned...to take advantage of it makes for an interesting read.

We launched a magazine - The Magazine Diaries — magazinediaries.com

Our own Peter Houston has been collecting 100 word diaries from magazine people continuing to do great work despite pandemic-induced lockdowns. Today's diary is from The Week Junior's Editor-in-Chief Anna Bassi. If you've been making magazines in lockdown and would like to write a diary entry, email Peter.

This week's episode:

Anorak Magazine’s Cathy Olmedillas on making magazines collectible — voices.media

On this 150th episode of Media Voices, Cathy Olmedillas, founder of independent children’s magazines Anorak and Dot, explains how she learned about the collectability of magazines from her time at The Face and turned that into a style of publishing that owes more to books than disposable magazines culture.

Discover your next favourite episode — voices.media

With 150 episodes in our library, we get it can be tough to know where to start if you want to find insightful interviews specifically for you. We've categorised all our episodes which you can filter through using our handy 'Discover' page, so whether it's editorial content, business models or innovations, you can find an interesting interview to suit you. Most interviews start 18-20 minutes in.