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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Times UK: When Your Traffic Hits the Paywall But according to fascinating analytics from Hitwise UK, the effect of pay models on overall reach may not be catastrophic. News Corp.’s flagship U.K. newspaper The Times began easing its way into an eventual paid access system last Tuesday by requiring registration. According to the analytics company Hitwise, traffic to the Times Web site dropped from a 4.37% share of the news and media market during a similar week in May to 2.67% last week. The weeklong metric is not reflective of the full effect of registration on traffic, however, because the Times only brought down the wall later in the week. On a daily basis for the days in which the model was in force, traffic plummeted to a 1.81% share of the market. Also dropping was time spent, which went from five and half minutes per session to three minutes. The overall time-spent figure may have been adversely affected by the number of people deciding to leave the site when they saw that registration was required.  While the traffic suppression as a result of a registration wall seems substantial, Hitwise analyst Robin Goad says that the drop is not as precipitous as many expected. In fact, the most-visited part of the Times universe of sites lately has been the new site dedicated to registration. Arguably, what may be lost in superficial search-driven traffic is gained by the richer data now available from a smaller pool of people who are coming for the Times brand. The real test will come, of course, when the full paid content system finally does descend on the Times. But for now, the run-up to a paywall system has not gutted the great newspaper’s brand power online. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com COMMENTS
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