Online paywall loses The Times millions of readers and customers

Its been a while since I even bothered to look at the home page of The Times or The Sunday Times website - but I wondered this evening what the effect had been of the imposition of the paywall on 2 July 2010?

According to this article on Brand Republic, the effect of the Times paywall has been pretty dramatic! According to the article:

The Times has lost 1.2 million UK readers across its daily and Sunday websites and almost halved the amount of time people spend on its sites in the past three months (Source data from ComScore)

In July 2010 the number of unique user visits to the Times websites was 1.61 million, which is only a few thousand more than we got on www.tutor2u.net! Maybe I should give Rupert Murdoch a call!

Has the paywall affected your use of The Times and Sunday Times? Over recent years I have been a huge fan of the Times websites and we regularly linked to useful resources featured on there. I dont think we’ve linked to anything in the last few months - what’s the point when the vast majority of tutor2u teachers and students dont have (or want) a subscription. So many of the main business, economics, politics and sociology stories continue to be covered so brilliantly by alternative sources. I doubt whether I’m alone in thinking that the Times simply didnt have a suitably specialist or differentiated content to justify paying for an online subscription?