Only 105,000 people paid either for one-pound day passes or two-pound monthly passes to view content on the website of the London Times, down from 20 million monthly users back before the pay wall was erected this summer. That’s a drop down to 0.5 percent, and the number also includes subscribers who have bought access through the iPad. Parent company News Corp. is touting this as a victory for pay walls, but British skeptics aren’t so sure. That’s a tiny amount of money to pull in for the massive hit in eyes that the site has taken, and the drastic drop-off of readers has no doubt affected advertising. Still, “over a couple of a million people look at the front page of The Times,” editor Jeremy Harding told BBC Radio 4. “We were engaged in a quite suicidal form of economics, which was giving our news away for free. We haven’t been cut off from the conversation, because the media works as a huge echo chamber and readers are commenting on our stories in a more engaging way.”
0.5 Percent Of Times Online Readers Have Converted To Paid [PaidContent]
