It’s no secret that Rupert Murdoch’s feelings toward the New York Times aren’t exactly positive. In fact, when he bought the Wall Street Journal back in 2007, he gave its editors an explicit mission: Broaden the Journal’s appeal so that it could rough over its rival. So it may be surprising to think Murdoch might offer any sort comfort to his enemy, but — in the same week that NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller finally launched the New York Times’ paywall — he might have done just that.

This week, executives from the Times of London, one of the most influential print outlets in Murdoch’s empire, revealed the latest news about its attempts to get online customers to pay for the journalism they’d previously been getting for free. Since the London Times installed a much-discussed paywall last summer, the company said it has amassed 79,000 paying digital subscribers, and logged some 222,000 “sales of digital products” (subscription required to see the data, of course.)

The exact meaning of all this is fuzzy, since the figures conveniently bundle together app purchases, web subscriptions and other online sales. But the newspaper itself says that this marks 60 percent growth from October, and that the paywall helped it achieve a “15-point swing” that puts its overall number of paying customers (print and digital) back into positive figures. That must sound great to the New York Times, right?

Yes and no. The London Times’ growth has clearly slowed (there were 50,000 subscribers in October, so the paper added another 29,000 in the subsequent three months) but the paper’s numbers suggest a paywall can be good for getting print readers engaged in an online product. PaidContent:UK suggests that 90 percent of those who have the combined print/digital package are using online products as well as receiving the newspaper itself.

On the other hand, there’s plenty of data to suggest that getting people to pay — a London Times digital subscription stands at £2 ($3.20) a week — might not be your financial savior. Over at the Guardian, Dan Sabbagh — himself a former Times media editor who knows News Corp inside out — points out that despite headline growth, the paywall is still losing money overall.

“Say News Corp gets to keep £7.50 a month on average, which is probably on the high end because iPad sign-ups are likely to be a significant part of the 79,000 figure. Now, anyway you look at it, that compares poorly to £6 a week for print, or about £25 a month. The newsstand customer is worth perhaps three times as much as the online reader at level of gross turnover.”

True, but still it’s worth remembering that on the Web — where average revenue per user can be infinitesimally small — that’s an achievement of sorts.

So what can this really tell us? And more to the point, what does it tell executives sitting in New York, mulling over the figures streaming in from their $40 million masterplan?

I’ve started with three things, but there are no doubt more lessons to come.

• A successful newspaper paywall may help arrest your headline circulation decline. It gives you a good story to tell your shareholders, investors and subscribers. Yes, the London numbers have been massaged a little — they are being released now because the Times thinks it has a positive tale to tell, particularly since four months is an odd interval between self-reported figures. But it’s not quite as bad as everyone thought it might be, which has some value in and of itself.
• A successful newspaper paywall won’t radically alter your subscriber base. This is important because the best thing that the New York Times has going for it is its brand value — but that far exceeds the reach it achieves with its circulation. As I mentioned when I wrote about the proposed launch of a British edition of the Huffington Post recently, UK newspapers have a far greater circulation per capita than their American equivalents — to the degree that the New York Times sells only 75 percent more copies each day than the London Times, despite the NYT’s access to a market that is five times larger. The London experiment suggests that a web paywall is unlikely to convince people who have never paid for the title in question to suddenly start forking out.
• A successful newspaper paywall is about slowing financial losses, not turning the digital model upside down. There’s no doubt that subscription services can be extremely valuable — if you offer something that’s unique and extremely worthwhile to your audience. In the world of general news and print, however, subscriptions, even when they don’t flame out completely, are largely about slowing decline. That gives companies time to work out their longer term strategies, which in the New York Times’s case means probably finding better subsidies from across the wider company, or by slashing newsroom costs.

Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger may be warmed, just a little, by what they can learn from Murdoch. But in truth, it’s nothing revelatory. We’ve written before that it’s backward looking, and it doesn’t necessarily help them in the long term. That’s all stuff that the New York Times should already understand, but whether or not it really believes it can turn the ship around is another question.

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