Jul
20
- Chris Braund
- 20/Jul/2010 15:58
Since adopting a pay model, The Times and The Sunday Times has lost around 90 per cent of its readership.
The Times started redirecting traffic to registration pages on 15th June, and put the pay wall fully in place at the start of July. Unregistered users of thetimes.co.uk now get redirected to a membership page to register if they want to view Times content.
The drop however is not a surprise, matching expectations set before the Times instituted the pay wall that traffic would fall by 90%. Which apparently is the standard experience when a site changes from free access to paid access. With the Sunday Times's editor, John Witherow, predicting in May that “perhaps more than 90%” of pre-registration readers were likely to be lost once the registration-only service was implemented.
The question is whether the number of people visiting the site will generate enough revenue to justify the experiment – which Rupert Murdoch says could produce “significant revenues”. Obviously if successful, this could see other free-access news websites following suit.