Times online: some unofficial numbers
Jinfo Blog

21st July 2010

By Penny Crossland

Item

We now have some figures, as yet unconfirmed by News International, on how many online readers have registered with The Times, and, more importantly, how many have agreed to become paying subscribers. See this LiveWire posting for initial reactions to the new paywall: http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29756. According to a former Times media correspondent, Dan Sabbagh, (http://digbig.com/5bcbdf), around 150,000 people registered on the Times site (http://www.timesplus.co.uk/welcome/index.htm) during the free trial period. Paidcontent says this figure shows that around 12 percent of the pre-paywall Times readers bothered to create an account on the site. (http://digbig.com/5bcbde) The more important statistic however is the one for paid subscribers, and this is so far a mere 15,000 or 10 percent of registered users. Given that the early stage of a paid-for model is likely to see the largest burst of subscribers, this looks like a disappointing start. However, not nearly as grim as Long Island's Newsday paper, which after three months of its paywall announced that it had 35 subscribers! (http://digbig.com/5bcbdc) On the plus side, the paper has signed up 12,500 iPad users, who pay £10 a month for the application. Also, while online traffic to the site has dropped by around by 67 percent since the introduction of the paywall, this is not as bad as some Times insiders had feared. They were expecting to loose up to 90% in terms of site visits. However, as Business Insider points out, (http://digbig.com/5bcbdb) even if all 150,000 registered users convert into paid subscribers (and this is highly unlikely), the resultant £15 million of revenue would still not be enough to finance the paper's news operations. As Dan Sabbagh points out, the newspaper industry looks like it is going the way of the music business: 'A declining print business; a modestly growing Apple dominated digital-paid for business -- and an internet free-for-all in which nobody pays for anything that erodes the previous two'.

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