Rupert Murdoch surely expected the readership of the The Times to drop today, as he begins charging for access to his flagship online newspaper.
But I wonder if he thought it would fall so far ahead of time, when registration was required but access was still free?
If graphs had sound FX, this one would go: "Deeeoooowwww...."
A 60% drop in traffic in just a couple of weeks is not to be sniffed at. But Murdoch is gambling that fewer readers coughing up £1 a day is worth a lot more than millions of extra readers paying nothing.
As an Internet publishing mogul myself, I’d love to see paid-for content becoming widespread on the Web. Either I’d get more cheapskate visitors, or I’d get more advertising, or – vanishingly unlikely – I could start to charge, too.
Yet I can also tell you the immediate problem for The Times is that nobody is now going to link to it. I’ve already dropped it from ‘Weekend Reading’ over on Monevator. Over time this will have a huge impact on its traffic.
Finally, the Daily Mail’s massive readership is depressing. All those sneaky peaks of a celebrity’s diet horror or a pop starlet exposing herself really do add up.
(Source: BBC)
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Aw, c’mon. You’ve been known to read the Mail too in the odd idle moment
You need something to leaven a diet of Bloomberg, the FT and the Economist.
Well, in my defence I never read The Mail…