The NYTimes.com paywall causes traffic to drop

by Steve Ragan - Apr 13 2011, 09:30

According to numbers posted by Hitwise, the newly erected paywall over at NYTimes.com has caused something of a dip in online traffic. Considering that the first NYT paywall implemented in 2005 failed, one has to ask if this is a bad omen for the publication. 

Hitwise, an online intelligence and marketing firm, looked at traffic to NYTimes.com 12 days before the paywall went live, and compared its collated figures to the traffic flow 12 days after.
 
“For the majority of the days, there was a decrease in the overall visits between 5% and 15%. The one exception was Saturday, April 9th, 2011 where there was a 7% increase, likely due to visitors seeking news around the potential government shutdown and ongoing budget discussions,” explained Heather Dougherty, director of research at Hitwise.

“The effect of the pay wall has been somewhat stronger upon the total page views for the NYTimes.com,” she added. “For all 12 days, there was a decline in total page views which ranged between 11% and 30%.”

The only issue with the traffic study is that it used a rather small data sample. It would be interesting to see the results after a full year of monitoring.

Speaking in a CNN report last month, NYT managing editor Jill Abramson commented that she believed the paper's journalism “is at such a level that people should be willing to pay to read it…”

Those remarks are interesting when the drop in traffic is taken into account.

Some visitors were given a free subscription to the paywall, courtesy of a promotion from Lincoln, but that doesn’t seem to have helped. Moreover, the paywall is more like a low fence, considering it can be dodged easily enough after the visitor's 20 free views have been used.

Aside from known workarounds, competitors like The Atlantic handpick the best of the front page and link visitors directly to the content, thus skipping the paywall entirely.

As it stands, $15 USD per month secures unlimited online and smartphone-based access, but a $20 USD fee includes unlimited online access and the NYT software application for Apple’s iPad tablet.

In 2005, The New York Times attempted to implement its first paywall, the Times Select, which lasted until 2007. While the publication has refused to comment on, or correct, the reported traffic figures, it has said this second attempt at enforcing paid viewing cost $40 million USD.

The Hitwise report can be viewed (for free) by clicking here.

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