Analysts guess subscriber numbers for The Times
Beehive City have carried out an analysis of recently published comScore stats for the Times and deduced that the true number of paying subscribers could be far lower than the raw data suggests.
Year on year figures for the Times website show an apparently modest drop in traffic from 2.426m to 1.614m unique visitors in the month of July, the period when News International erected their paywall.
However, breaking these figures down into pages viewed the drop was far more substantial, plummeting from 24m (10 page views per visitor) to 9m (6 page views per visitor) over the same period. But even this lowly figure is almost certainly “flattered” claim Beehive.
They base this on the fact that users must now log into the website and enter through the homepage, a routing system that automatically adds two page views for every visitor even those attempting to access the site forgetting that it is pay only.
In addition it is alleged that articles are now subdivided into more multiple pages than before, a ploy which also serves to artificially increase ‘page views’.
These factors lead to the assumption that the number of paying customers must be relatively low and indeed by racking up hypothetical page views it is reckoned that (amongst other permutations) the July 2010 page view average of six could be achieved at a ratio of one payer to 39 non payers.
Presuming this to be accurate that would equate to just 40,000 paying customers from comScore’s cumulative total of 1.614m unique visitors.