Times loses almost 90% of online readership
The Guardian:
The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show.Making people pay or register to access your content causes a loss of readership 1. Big surprise.
But let’s look at this from a different perspective. Let’s assume the Times had a million readers before the paywall went up, in which case a 90 percent drop would mean that they now have around 100,000. Let’s also assume that the Times used to sell ads and rake in a $10CPM fee (which is probably high—but it doesn’t matter).
If every one of those readers read one page, they would generate $10,000 in advertising. If every one of the 100,000 “paywall” users forks $1 to buy access for one day, they generate $100,000 in fees. In other words, it would take ten times as much usage from ten times as many people in order to generate the same revenue without the paywall.
Now, I’m no big fan of paywalls, but maybe these people have realized that newspapers are in the business of selling content and not eyeballs?
- That’s of course assuming that these “calculations” are correct. ↩
Comments
I guess that with less readers but even comparable revenue they can actually gain more in a long run. Less traffic means lower maintenance costs. With more money available to spend on improving content they will be able to attract (gain back) more new (old) readers. Once you don’t depend on CPM it’s not about how many readers you have. It’s about how much can you earn per single one of them.
Not to say that I’m necessarily a big fan of paywalls either, but strictly in cui bono terms, I’d kinda like the idea of having to pay for my news, rather than have it bought for me by companies interested in promoting something. Not saying that *prevents* biased journalism, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.
“News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising”.
- Rubin Frank, former president, NBC News