The Times & Sunday Times website have suffered a huge drop in their readership after their parent company News Corp introduced a controversial paywall, requiring readers to subscribe before they get access to the content on their sites.
As of June 15th, readers were asked to pay either £2 a week or £1 a day to view the sites an unprecedented move for a UK news paper.
As expected, they have seen a mass exodus of readers from their online sites. Web stat experts Experian Hitwise have revealed that The Times has seen its share of UK readership decline from 15% percent to 4.6% – equating to two thirds of their readers.
Correlating the Experian Hitwise findings against February 2010’s ABCe readership figures, The Guardian has calculated exactly where The Times Online readership numbers now stand. According to their sums, The Times online has dropped from 1.2 million daily unique visitors to 332,800.
But the figures could be even worse; Experian Hitwise’s stats include those who visit the site’s homepage but do not proceed beyond the paywall. According to the Experian Hitwise findings, only 25.6 per cent of users proceed to the paid-for area, meaning that in reality The Times now has just a mere 84,500 subscribing readers.
So it would seem that the market has spoken and it doesn't look good. Although The Times have said that a smaller more loyal readership could be balanced by increasingly targeted advertising campaigns - so every cloud has silver lining we suppose.
2 thoughts on “The Times Experience Huge Loss in Readers after Introducing Controversial Paywall”
“The Times have said that a smaller more loyal readership could be balanced by increasingly targeted advertising campaigns”.
Sounds like a lose lose situation. Do they not know the etiquette of websites?
If you want to make money from a website you either have adverts OR charge people a subscription. Certainly not both, who wants to pay to see adverts?
Looks like it gonna fail and fail badly.