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Alexa the Times Rupert Murdoch

Online decline makes uncomfortable reading for The Times

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By The Drum Team, Editorial

August 18, 2010 | 2 min read

The Times online, guinea pig for News International’s pay to view experiment, has seen its readership plummet by 1.2m unique users over the period from May.

The precipitous fall represented a 54.8% drop from its rating three months ago according to traffic ranking service Alexa, which charts the vertiginous decline in users since a paywall was raised on July 2.

Rupert Murdoch is likely to be wincing at the numbers in any event and will be under increasing pressure to publish registration numbers if the Times are to retain the confidence of advertisers such as Lloyds TSB and Holiday Place who have remained loyal to the format thus far.

Nevertheless this isn’t quite the catastrophic collapse that News International themselves predicted prior to introducing the pay format, initial guesstimates had estimated anything up to a 90% fall.

Murdoch expects to rake in more revenue from a small number of paying subscribers than could be generated through advertising alone with a larger volume of readers.

Alexa the Times Rupert Murdoch

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