Is the writing on The Times’ paywall?

Just a couple of months ago, The Times’ free-to-access website, timesonline.co.uk, attracted around 2.8 million unique users in the UK alone.

However, its owners, News International, launched two separate publications thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk where registration would become mandatory and readers charged for exclusive access to the content.

The problem now is that, according to ComScore, the combined number of unique visitors to the two new sites has tanked. In fact, it has fallen to just 1.6 million in July from a high of 2.2 million in June and 2.8 million in May.

And it gets worse. The average number of minutes spent on the site has fallen from 7.6 in May and 5.8 in June to only 4.0 in July. Page views too have dropped from approx. 29 million in May to 20 million in June and 9 million in July.

In total, The Times has lost 1.2 million UK readers across its paywall websites and the time its users have spent online in the past three months has almost halved.

Despite attempts of an enticing introductory offer, these numbers don’t bode well. True, it’s still relatively early days yet but the signs even at this early stage don’t look good.

The drop in readership has come as no surprise even to the paper group themselves who predicted the potential for a sharp decline. Thorough research by the Group would have been undertaken to scrutinise the online advertising v subscription model and a conclusion drawn from that – with many other online publications watching very closely it should be noted.

So what’s brought about this decline in usage?

There are a likely to be a combination of reasons but, it seems on the face of it that, if you can get what you want for free, most people are unlikely to want to pay for it. A salutory lesson indeed… at least for now.

Hold the front page.