News of the World lose 38% of visitors in first two weeks behind paywall
Beehive City is reporting that The News of the World, now bricked up behind its anti-social media paywall, has witnessed a 38.5% drop in monthly unique visitors to its website between September and October 2010 based on comScore figures.
The News of the World paywall only went live in mid-October so that is a particularly sharp drop as it includes half of the month when the site was still free to access.
In September, the News of the World website attracted 1.562 million unique users, but that fell to 960,000 in October after News International began charging £1 for 24 hours’ access, or £1.99 for four weeks’ subscription to access www.notw.co.uk.
As with the long wait to very little data with The Times, which we finally get last week, I’m guessing no official figures will be issued for quite some time.
“The News of the World followed its News International stable mates The Times and The Sunday Times behind a paywall on October 14th, meaning that the October decrease only includes two weeks of numbers for the website behind the paywall. It is fair to assume that almost all of the paper’s online losses took place in that two week period as the websites free-to-air traffic had in fact been growing month-on-month since July.”
The fall off is likely to be as steep, if not higher, than the 90% plus drop in traffic at the The Times.
Yesterday we saw cracks in The Times paywall as Three began providing free subscriptions to the Times paywall sites. Are we going to see similar deals for the News of the World? It would be a good bet.
I’ve blogged before and I’m bound to blog it again that paywalls will and do work, but they don’t work (or they don’t work that well) if you completely entomb them from the social media sharing world. It makes no sense. Just read what the New York Times digital boss had to say about it all -Martin Nisenholtz said that social media turbo charges news.
Anyway, the New of the World is going to be an interesting case study. Making people pay for tabloid content online is a very tough sell and strikes me a bit like trying to make a buck out of selling porn online – there is so much free celebrity based competition.
Read also – More on The Wall
Three provides free subscription to Times paywall sites
Clay Shirky: paywall has reduced The Times to a Tory “newsletter”
All Comments
This Editor is Trippin! He bangs on about Paywalls working – but they just don’t. They wrech the internet experience, take away Jobs, decrease competition and are set up 100% solely to make a Fat businessman more money while rinsing us of our cash more often.
To say it works is like saying Communism works – its there but is it for the best? NO!!
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