A further reduction in visitors for The Times online
The Times online readership declined by 120,000 from July to August according to data supplied to the Beehive by marketing analysts comScore.
In August 2010, its second month behind a paywall, The Times received 1.459 million unique visitors, dropping 7.6 per cent from 1.579 million in July.
In addition, the total minutes spent on the site decreased 16 per cent from 6 million in July to 5 million in August, and total page views slumped 22 per cent in a month, decreasing from 9 million in July to 7 million in August.
Although a slight reduction in readers is to be expected during the August holiday season, The Times 7.6 per cent decrease in unique visitors is more than four times larger than that of its broadsheet competitors online.
In the same period, The Guardian’s unique visitor count decreased by 75,000 (-1.6%), The Telegraph lost 46,000 readers (-1.1%) and The Independent actually gained online readers as their unique visitors rose 1.3 per cent from 3.43 million in July to 3.47 million in August.
Another worrying sign for The Times is that despite some seasonal drop-off in unique visitors, The Guardian and The Telegraph both enjoyed modest increases in their total page views and total minutes spent on their sites, a pattern that was repeated at The Independent.
The Times went behind a paywall this July, and lost 575,000 unique visitors (-26.7%) in its first month, with uniques decreasing from 2.154m in June to 1.579m for the following month. The July 2010 figure when compared to the same month in 2009 represents a 34.9 per cent decrease in visitors, a number which has risen to a 37.6 per cent decrease in unique visitors when August 2010 is compared to August 2009.
It is important to note that a unique visitor of The Times website is different to a paying subscriber. Anyone who visits the front page, even if they immediately leave when they come across the paywall login / sign-up screen will be counted as a visitor, so the numbers do not tell us how many people are actually reading the content. In fact, the extremely low page view rate and total time on the site, when compared to its rivals, suggests that this ‘bounce’ effect could be making up a significant proportion of unique visitors logged.
Although News International has not released the number of paying subscribers for their online property, the Beehive revealed in July that the number was, at that time, around 15,000 with an additional 12,500 subscribing to the The Times’s iPad application.
By how much those initial numbers have increased remains a matter for speculation, but it cannot be good news for News International that month on month less people are visiting the site, spending less time on it and looking at fewer pages … especially as another of their newspapers, The News of The World is about to take the plunge and disappear behind a paywall of its own next month.
they had advert on tv last night for times online.