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Is The Times paywall working?
The Observer today reports on a significant drop in The Times’ traffic since the launch of its paywall.
The Experian data it reports is much richer and shows the following data:
- Overall drop in visits of 66%
- Linger time drops from 5 minutes to 3.5 minutes
The question is–and not touched on–in the Observer piece is whether this is a good or bad outcome.
It’s early days to make a call. But my judgement:
- Linger time for people who don’t bounce off the paywall has probably increased. Times probably has a much larger number of people seeing one page only (the paybarrier).
- The drop in visits it far lower than I would have expected. The net sentiment was that a drop would be precitipitous–like 95% or more. To have only seen a drop of 60 or 70% actually leaves traffic at The Times an order of magnitude higher than some predictions.
The Times was seeing about 20m visits a month, call it 5m unique users per month. If conversion rates to paid are really running at 33% (with a 66% of traffic declining), then the times will be looking at 1.5m subscriptions. At the promotion rate of £1 for 30 days, that works out at £1.5m in revenues.
If they hold on to 50% of those users after the initial trial, then they’ll run to 750k subs at £100 per year or £75m a year.
If they hold on to 10%, then it is a paltry £15m a year.
Replete with assumptions but it shows the fine balance. At 750k paying subscribers, the subscription revenue, together with higher advertising yields might become material.
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