Here’s a graph of The Times’s share of internet newspaper website traffic.
Going down
Note:
May 25th: New look Times websites introduced.
June 15: Times online shut
As The Times and its Sunday sister title goes behind the paywall today, a lot has been made of these (utterly inconclusive) graphs from Hitwise, purporting to show us something. The trouble is nobody has had to start paying until today. So whatever this shows, it doesn’t tell us too much yet.
The trendline is clearly down, although you might have guessed that, and will carry on falling further. However, it only needs a relatively modest number of subscribers (I’ve stabbed at 200,000 before) for the scheme to be declared a financial success. My sense is we should hush our mouths and wait for some audited figures; they will come soon enough.
Now, here’s another graph which shows what has happened to the market share of all online newspapers, which also tells you not very much. This is calculated on a weekly basis (which is why the market share for the The Times is higher than on a daily basis). So who’s gaining all the traffic? Well, there’s no obvious winner in traffic terms, but with a 4-5 per cent market share, The Times has a modest share in a fragmented market. Which means it doesn’t have a lot to give away. (Mind you as the percentages in the chart don’t add up to 100, I have no idea really what this graph means).
Yep, lots of wiggly lines
The official view is that so far, it’s not looking too bad for The Times paywall gambit. That may turn out to be true, but I think a fairer answer is that nobody really has a clue, except perhaps the bean counters at News International who are watching the online tills ring up.
[...] launched in London, analysts say. Suffering a long-term fall in sales and a collapse in …Graphs that tell you nothing about The Times paywall prospectsBeehive CityChanging TimesBBC NewsMurdoch titles now charge for their online newsThe GuardianChannel [...]
To me it looks like just another ‘Murdoch Windup’ he knows that advertising revenues will dry up, for who will pay to advertise in a Newspaper with a very limited audience?
Awhile ago Murdoch was moaning about Google saying they were pinching his News, yet if Google took News Corp out of its register, News Corp might fail to exist online.
Do us all a Big ,Big favour Murdoch and keep your so-called News, we don’t want it or need it.
As I said before ‘Cut Your Nose Off to Spite Your Face’ please do.
Signed Carl Barron Chairman of agpcuk
http://disqus.com/Carl_Barron/
http://carl-agpcuk.livejournal.com/