Times paywall sees traffic plummet

Visits to the websites of The Times and The Sunday Times dropped from 2.79 million in May 2010 to 1.61 million in July 2010, web metrics firm ComScore has revealed.

News International, the owner of the two websites, installed a paywall at the beginning of July in order to arrest the decline in revenues caused by falling sales of newspapers.

News International has so far not revealed any information about traffic on the two sites since the paywall was introduced or how much money it was generating, but ComScore's data suggests that traffic has fallen by 27 per cent since June and 42 per cent since May.

The pre-paywall drop between May and June could be explained by all visitors to the sites being required to register to access content beyond the homepage, though visitors didn't have to pay for access until 2 July.

Visitors are also spending less time on the site than the previous two months - in May, visitors spent an average of 7.6 minutes on the site, dropping to 5.8 minutes in June and to just four minutes in July.

Page views declined from 29 million in May to just nine million in July.

News International was criticised by many organisations including Google for its plans to charge for access when many other websites offered very similar content for free.

Early figures from traffic-monitoring firm Hitwise suggested that the sites lost two-thirds of their visitors in the first week after the paywall was introduced.

However, the Guardian argued that the real figure could have been as high as 90 per cent because Hitwise's figures didn't take into account people who visited the site only to leave immediately after being asked to pay for access beyond the homepage.