Rupert Muroch made a big statement and said that The Times, had to move to a paid-content online subscription system and made the transition. We now read the figure for July from ComScore which shows a 1.2 million user drop for May’s 2.79 million-strong readership, to 1.61 million. More disturbing is the drop in the visitors' average time on the site from 7.6 minutes in May to 4 minutes in July.News Corp head Rupert Murdoch is quoted "With our paywall around the Times, we have had an encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price,"
However, trends in July impacted the free Telegraph and Guardian who both recording losses of online readership whilst The Mail Online and The Independent, strengthened to 9 million and 3.54 million unique visitors, respectively.
So who is right and who is wrong and who cares? The one thing that is certain is the Murdoch will not admit he was wrong easily . It’s said that obne swallow doesn’t make a summer and it will take more then one readership drop to herald Winter.
1 comment:
This looks like a win for Murdoch to me. 2.79 million readers paying nothing are certainly worth less than 1.6 million readers paying a nominal amount. Although on the face of it advertisers might be less happy with the drop in numbers, in reality they will be advertising to a much more select community, with money to spend, and who are no doubt more segmentable as they will have registered with the website to pay.
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