A drop in use was probably expected when the Times put up a paywall on their website, but I doubt they expected the drop to be on the order of 90%:
The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.
Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk are now “bounced” to a Times+ membership page where they have to register if they want to view Times content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian) that have been used to track the performance of major UK press titles online, visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.
These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.
If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.
I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times at all, and no longer link to anything there (because most of my readers wouldn’t be able to open the link anyway). The Times might as well have gone out of business, from the online perspective.
“I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times at all”
Me too.
And millions of others.
I saw nothing wrong with pay-per-view, excepting that there were too many other free sources of news out there to make me want to pay.
In the long run, The Times might be right; we may be coming to the end of the 10-year “free news” years; and maybe ten years from now we’ll be back to paying per-issue or per-day for our daily news(paper).
In the meantime, The Times will be selling shoelaces, threads, and needles on, well, Threadneedle Street.
Comment by Chris Greaves — July 21, 2010 @ 05:48
I’m firmly of the belief that if the owner of the Times wanted to require drug testing of all would-be purchasers of his newspaper he’s free to do so . . . and the prospective purchasers are equally free to tell him to go piss up a rope.
If there was a reliable method of assessing micropayments, pay-per-view might have a chance. If there’s a flat charge for any access at all, I’ll go to one of the other sites I frequent (almost always by a direct link to an article, not by visiting the “front page”).
Comment by Nicholas — July 21, 2010 @ 08:52