danielknox.net

A few (entirely unofficial) reports on the impact on traffic to TheTimes.co.uk following its decision to put up a paywall earlier this month (as covered in my previous post).

The Guardian reported that TheTimes.co.uk lost almost 90% of its online readers based on internal analysis of Hitwise and ABCe data, while PaidContent claims visits to TheTimes.co.uk are down by 67%, compared to visits pre-paywall. 

Meanwhile, former Times media correspondent Dan Sabbagh reported that 150,000 people registering for the site during the free trial period, and 15,000 people are actually paying for access to the site.

No official statement from News International yet.

CBS is expected to announce Dec. 14 that it will no longer do business
with third-party ad networks, and will instead sell all of its considerable online inventory on its own.

SAI reports that BusinessWeek Exchange only has 37,000 registered users.

Despite the embarrassingly low number of registered users BusinessWeek expects to earn $5MM from BW Exchange this year. Put another way, BusinessWeek expects to earn over $100 in revenue per registered user of BW Exchange(!!)

I’m sure they’re able to command some impressive CPMs, however even with outrageous CPM and usage assumptions I can’t get those numbers to work together. For instance, using a ‘crazy’ CPM of $100, it would require 4 pageviews / day for every single registered user of BW Exchange to get to the $5MM revenue figure. (Actually it would slightly more than 4 pageviews / day / users because I’m a registered user and I certainly don’t view 4 pages every single day).

So, any thoughts on how BusinessWeek could be making $5MM a year from this? Maybe a few big sponsorship deals?

So Rupert Murdoch is looking to charge for reading the news on his sites:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/aug/06/rupert-murdoch-internet-pay

This seems to make sense for only some of his properties. It kind of works at the Wall Street Journal, although even they have a hybrid free/pay system. It may work for some content on a site like TimesOnline which has really strong columnists, but for The Sun or News of the World I just don’t see it. I can only see this being sustainable if the rest of the industry follows – otherwise are Times readers so loyal that they’d subscribe rather than go to the free Telegraph / Independent / Guardian sites instead; ditto Sun or NotW readers and free Mirror / Daily Mail sites.

Great Wired article on focusing on Google’s online auction system.