How's it going?
The News of the World website has recorded a 59 per cent decrease in unique users to its website in November -it’s first full month behind a paywall – compared to September 2010 - its last free-to-air month, according to comScore data supplied to the Beehive.
In November 2010, Nowt.co.uk attracted just 643,000 unique users, decreasing from 960,000 in October, half of which was spent behind the paywall which went live on October 14th. In September 2010, the website recorded 1.562 million unique users.
Quite a large drop …
Perhaps even more worryingly for the Notw.co.uk is the collapse of time spent on the site and page views in the past two months, suggesting that many of the unique users that have been recorded got no further than the paywall sign-up page, then simply bounced away to their favourite free to air site.
In September, when the News of the World website was still free, it recorded a total of 10 million minutes spent by users on the site, collectively viewing 14 million webpages. In November, those figures decreased dramatically to just 2 million minutes on the site (an 80 per cent decrease) and the number of pages viewed fell to a lowly 3 million … 79 per cent fewer than in September.
The News of the World site is the third of News International’s newspapers to go behind a paywall on the Internet in the UK, following the Times and the Sunday Times which became pay-for-websites in July of this year.
The Times has continued to record unique user losses, despite claims from News Int that the website is attracting a committed and engaged audience.
In total, the two Times Online web products have recorded a 40 per cent decrease in unique users since June (their last free-to-air month). In November the combined Times products recorded 1.132 million unique users compared to 2.219 in June 2010.
However, although Times.co.uk continued to lose unique users last month the Sunday Times website actually reported an increase in its users, rising from (an albeit low) 61,000 visitors in October to 91,000 in November. This figure is higher than the 71,000 who visited (the rather anonymous) website in June, before you had to pay for it.
Generally, the last month was a good one in digital newspaper land, with all national dailies in the UK (apart from the The Times and the NOTW) recording increases in traffic between October and November.
The Daily Mail website continued its steady growth as an Internet behemoth, enjoying a 14 per cent increase in uniques, rising from 10 million to 11.4 million.
The Guardian also did well online, with comScore reporting a rise from 9.267 million unique users in October to 10.841 million in November … a monthly increase of 17 per cent.
Good news for the Mirror too, whose traffic rose by 8 per cent to 4.22 million in November, the Indie, who saw an 8 per cent increase to 4.1 million, and the Telegraph who increased unique users by 2 per cent to 4.1 million also.
The Sun reported a 9.9 per cent increase in its traffic from 3.256 milion to 3.577 million.
However, the biggest month on month increase was made by the Metro website, who jumped a massive 25 per cent in unique users from October to November, rising from 2.5 million to 3.1 million in just 30 days.
