News Corp. says it has gotten 105,000 paying customers to the digital versions of "The Times" and "The Sunday Times of London" since it started charging for access to their Web sites in June 2010. Of course, the paper's website used to get three million unique viewers a month.
The company said “around half” of these were regular, active subscribers to the newspapers’ Web sites, iPad application or Amazon Kindle edition. The rest are occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers, News Corp. said.
When it switched to a paid model, News Corp. estimated that the number of visitors to The Times and Sunday Times Web sites would drop by 90 percent.
In fact, traffic appears to have fallen by somewhat less. Nielsen, the media audience measurement agency, said last week that the average number of monthly unique visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites from Britain had fallen by 42 percent, to 1.78 million, in the third quarter, after the pay wall went up.
You have to draw your own conclusions about which model--paywall or not--makes more sense for a content provider. To the extent that News Corp. expected a 90-percent drop of visitors, the 42-percent drop is better than expected. But News Corp. also has an advantage: it publishes media such as the Wall Street Journal that arguably have high value and a readership for whom subscription prices are not generally an issue. That will not be case for most other print media.
Roughly 50,000 web-only paid subscription readers might be considered a success, or not, depending on how highly a media firm values reach and readership that create ad revenue, compared to direct subscription revenues that could come at the expense of ad potential.
