Stats on The Times Paywall Attempt

Three weeks ago, British daily The Times erected a paywall to all of its online content. Non-registered subscribers were kicked to places where they could sign-up if they tried to find some content. How have things gone since then? According to stats from Hitwise:

• Between February and June (when the wall went live), Times has seen a 90 percent drop off in visitors, from 1.2 million daily users to just above 190,000
• Before the wall, Times accounted for 15.4 percent of all UK “quality press traffic;” now, it is just 4.16 percent
• A free online subscription is available for the 150,000 print subscribers to the paper, but estimates indicate that there are about 15,000 people who pay £2 a week for access. This works out to approximately just £1,400,000 pounds a year (approximately $2,135,560) – probably not enough to save journalism.

Data was reported by The Guardian, which doesn’t have a paywall and lets me link to it.