24 June 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor
Announced nearly a year ago, the plan gained a bit more momentum in March, when worldwide News Corp leader Rupert Murdoch suggested the changes would come "Within the next few weeks to months."
That's why, beginning in early June a new Times site, thetimes.co.uk, was set up, requiring visitors to register for a 'free preview' of content from the publication. News Corp subsequently redirected all queries to the old site - timesonline.co.uk - to the new URL.
And, its online readership has plummeted.
In the month of May, The Times commanded between 4 and 5 per cent of daily market share on any given day, which dropped, as of Wednesday 23 June, to a lowly 1.81 per cent daily market share.
Adding to this digital dive, the publication's web site also experienced a lower average viewing time, with visitors sticking it out around three minutes versus previous averages of five and a half minutes.
This figure may provide one ray of light for the Times, however, as research director for Experian Hitwise Robin Goad noted: "That figure is actually higher than many people would have expected, given that a lots of visitors will be spending very little time there if they are choosing not to register."
The online portals of broadsheet competitors, such as the Independent, the Telegraph and the Guardian, scooped up many of the deflected web crawlers.
Goad maintained that it's too early in the game to use these figures as an indicator for paid content, describing the drop as not being "catastrophic".
"The real test will come when people actually have to pay rather than simply register to view the Times' content," Goad said.
Many readers refuse to scale The Times' paywall
After kicking the idea around for a good while, News Corp International and, by proxy, its subsidiary, the major UK newspaper The Times, has finally enacted a paywall around the Times site, making users register in advance of a planned paid content strategy.Announced nearly a year ago, the plan gained a bit more momentum in March, when worldwide News Corp leader Rupert Murdoch suggested the changes would come "Within the next few weeks to months."
That's why, beginning in early June a new Times site, thetimes.co.uk, was set up, requiring visitors to register for a 'free preview' of content from the publication. News Corp subsequently redirected all queries to the old site - timesonline.co.uk - to the new URL.
And, its online readership has plummeted.
In the month of May, The Times commanded between 4 and 5 per cent of daily market share on any given day, which dropped, as of Wednesday 23 June, to a lowly 1.81 per cent daily market share.
Adding to this digital dive, the publication's web site also experienced a lower average viewing time, with visitors sticking it out around three minutes versus previous averages of five and a half minutes.
This figure may provide one ray of light for the Times, however, as research director for Experian Hitwise Robin Goad noted: "That figure is actually higher than many people would have expected, given that a lots of visitors will be spending very little time there if they are choosing not to register."
The online portals of broadsheet competitors, such as the Independent, the Telegraph and the Guardian, scooped up many of the deflected web crawlers.
Goad maintained that it's too early in the game to use these figures as an indicator for paid content, describing the drop as not being "catastrophic".
"The real test will come when people actually have to pay rather than simply register to view the Times' content," Goad said.
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