The CutlineStating the obvious: NYTimes.com losing traffic since paid model kicked in
Over the past year, as New York Times executives were devising their paid online plan, they took pains to build stopgaps into the system that would stanch some of the online traffic that the paper of record would lose as a segment of its digital readership chafed at the prospect of paying for content that was formerly free for the asking. Under the new model, readers get a monthly 20-article quota before they have to punch in their credit card digits. And they can consume the entire website for free--provided that they are willing to access all of the articles via third-party blogs and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
But for all the safeguards in place, the paper was bound to see its traffic decline—and sure enough, the first evidence of that dropoff came today via Experian Hitwise, an analytics firm that logged traffic on nytimes.com in the 12 days before and after the March 28 pay meter launch.
"For the majority of the days, there was a decrease in the overall visits between 5 percent and 15 percent," according to Experian. "The one exception was Saturday, April 9th, 2011 where there was a 7percent increase, likely due to visitors seeking news around the potential government shutdown and ongoing budget discussions." Additionally: "The effect of the pay wall has been somewhat stronger upon the total page views for the NYTimes.com, with the same comparison of a 12 day period before the launch of the pay wall to the 12 days following the launch. For all 12 days, there was a decline in total page views which ranged between 11 percent and 30 percent." (See chart above)
Of course, it's too early to tell what long-term effects the pay model will have on traffic. And Times managers continue to insist that they're none too concerned with the initial metrics.
"This is not about what's happening over the next month, or the next quarter, or even the next year," said Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. during a talk at Columbia's journalism school last week. "This is a longer-term bet on where we think the digital world is going. We don't want to get into this day by day mentality."
And it could be a lot worse: Had the Times opted for an unconditional pay model, as News Corp's Times of London did, the paper would have been looking at a much steeper decline. The U.K. Times was said to have lost 90 percent of its web traffic in the months after putting up its paywall last May.
