{"id":4633,"date":"2010-07-20T07:37:51","date_gmt":"2010-07-20T11:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=4633"},"modified":"2010-07-20T07:40:17","modified_gmt":"2010-07-20T11:40:17","slug":"paywall-experiment-not-going-to-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/07\/20\/paywall-experiment-not-going-to-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Paywall experiment not going to plan"},"content":{"rendered":"

A drop in use was probably expected when the Times<\/em> put up a paywall on their website, but I doubt they expected the drop to be on the order of 90%<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

The Times<\/em> has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian<\/em> show.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> content. Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users sign up and proceed to a Times<\/em> web page; based on custom categories (created at the Guardian<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n

These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times<\/em> site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online<\/em> 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<\/em> site.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 a 93% fall compared with May.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I have to admit that the paywall meant I just didn’t bother going to the Times<\/em> 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<\/em> might as well have gone out of business, from the online perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28,15],"tags":[156,58,213],"class_list":["post-4633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-media","category-technology","tag-fail","tag-internet","tag-newspapers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1cJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4633"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4635,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions\/4635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}