Madebymany.co.uk nearly as popular as The Times, shock

Is anyone visiting times.co.uk?* Never mind that, is anyone still buying the newspaper? Media Week reports today that in August The Times newspaper circulation fell by 1.7%, going below 500,000 for the first time and confounding News International executives’ expectations that by putting thetimes.co.uk behind a paywall they would protect print circulation.

The Times management view seems to fly in the face of common sense. Different channels promote each other and, whatever the reason for the circulation fall (The Guardian fell too, by 1.85%), making times.co.uk subscription-only won’t have helped print sales.

It’s hard to call the paywall a failure when charging for something that others give away free resembles nothing so much as suicide. So how close to death is thetimes.co.uk?

In the absence of hard figures on unique visitors it’s not easy to see quite how bad things are. In mid-August Comscore reported that visits had fallen by 42% between May (when registration became compulsory) and July (after the paywall went up) down from 2.8 million to 1.6 million.

There’s another interesting statistic, which is that page views  per visit have plummeted from 29 to 9 and average time on site from 7.6 minutes to 4. This means one thing: most of those 1.6 million visits got no further than home and the demand for £1 per visit or £2 per week. Hitwise figures showed a 67% drop which the Guardian interpreted as a 90% fall off in visits to all pages other than home.

That still leaves 250,000 or so paid-for visits per month, whether one-offs or longer term subscriptions. Assuming 3-5 visits per subscriber per week, that works out at somewhere between 20,000 and 12,000 subscribers. That’s a range that fits slap around a much-quoted estimate of 15,000 sign ups by ex-NI executive Dan Sabbagh.

So, home page excepted – and as long as you buy my assumptions in the previous paragraph – times.co.uk now has just under twice as many unique visitors as the madebymany blog! (Rupert, get back, it’s not for sale).

Not surprisingly the pain this is causing has less to do with subscription revenues than on reach and influence and, most especially, advertising.

The Independent reported last week that:

“Faced with a collapse in traffic to thetimes.co.uk, some advertisers have simply abandoned the site. Rob Lynam, head of press trading at the media agency MEC, whose clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Orange, Morrisons and Chanel, says, “We are just not advertising on it. If there’s no traffic on there, there’s no point in advertising on there.”

Almost as bad, people aren’t bothering to talk to the journalists anymore and the journalists are fed up that nobody is reading their copy.

PRs are saying their clients “are increasingly reluctant to give interviews or stories to The Times, on the grounds that they would not be made freely available via search engines.

“Dan Sabbagh, a former media editor at The Times who now runs the media website Beehive City, says News International journalists are frustrated by the decline in their audience.”“Dan Sabbagh, a former media editor at The Times who now runs the media website Beehive City, says News International journalists are frustrated by the decline in their audience.”

That leaves one strand of hope for New International if their strategy is all about gathering customer information that can be used to sell on other products such as Sky tv and broadband. But 20,000 customers doesn’t really seem nearly enough, does it?

*Yes. As I write, the paywall is down for ‘routine maintenance’ and access is free!