When the Times restricted their website with a paywall, they suffered a huge readership loss. They had around 41 million daily page views at the time of implementing the paywall. But soon, in 4 months, from May 2011 to September 2011, they were getting only 4 million page views. It’s a downfall of almost 90% of online viewership.
But still, the Times of London is among the largest newspaper corporations, and they recover from the immediate loss of viewership. And that was the whole idea, to convert the viewers and readers into paying subscribers.
But how many people accepted the paywall? How many visitors missed the Times element in the news that they are willing to pay, even though they could also get the news for free?
The real reason is the quality of the articles and columns of them. According to Statista, Times’ average monthly reach was 15 million visitors in a year (stats from April 2019 to March 2020). Among those 15 million visitors, 11.7 were above the age of 35. It seems like aging people like to read something quality.
But if we talk about the actual digital readers only, 4.1 million out of 15 were subscribed to the website. And the print subscribers were sitting above 6 million from 120 countries around the globe. That gives us an estimated 10+ million readers behind the paywall.
