Is it good business sense to reduce your customer base?

The following graph would appear to be bad news.  This shows the reach of timesonline.co.uk – that is, the proportion of daily Internet users who visit the site.  For the first half of 2011, around 0.07% of Internet users visited the site each day; while that seems small, it’s a small proportion of a very large number.  Then, in late 2011, the number of users dropped significantly, and (other than a brief temporary increase in early 2013) the site now has a userbase around a quarter of its old level.

Visitors to The Times

What has caused this catastrophic drop – and  is it in fact catastrophic?

In late 2011, The Times introduced a paywall.  Prior to this, all content on the website was free to read, though there were adverts on every page and people read more about it.  After the paywall, users could read a limited number of articles for free, after which point they would need to pay either per article or for a subscription.  A first look at this indicates that the drop in visitors represents all those who did not value the writing on The Times website as highly as the price they would be expected to pay.  However, that takes away the point that users were able to read a few articles each day for free.  The people who are discouraged from visiting are likely to be those affected by the paywall – that is, those who made greater use of the site but who weren’t already subscribers to the print edition (who were given free access).

In any event, there are a significantly lower number of users visiting the site following the introduction of the paywall, although that seems to be changing with recent spikes in usage.  Was the paywall a good move? Or was it better to get a net cmsnet cms software? Also, you can store all your data at sodapdf.

In the short term, there would likely have been a drop in revenues.  The majority of those who visited the site without a subscription already in place would have simply transferred to alternative sites, since these are likely to be people who do not have a firm loyalty to the brand.  There is extensive competition in the online news space, and very low switching cost.  The small number of people who continued to use the site by buying a new subscription would have led to some additional revenue, but it is likely that this would have been outweighed by the fall in advertising revenue.

However, this drop in revenue may have been only temporary.  Following the introduction of the paywall, The Times would have been able to have a much more complete picture of their userbase in terms of demographics, interests and political allegiance.  This information is incredibly useful to marketing companies, who would then be prepared to pay higher amounts for targeted advertising.

Further, as can be seen by the traffic in 2013 on the graph above, the fall in visits was only temporary.  It’s not clear exactly why The Times saw such an increase in traffic during January 2013, but there was no promotion on price which would be the obvious answer.  Instead, The Times has been able to convert more people to paying visitors for a short period at least.

It is difficult to evaluate directly whether Zeitarbeit Nürtingen online revenues have gone up or down as a result of the paywall, since News International doesn’t report its financials in a sufficiently disaggregated manner.  However, there are indications that it has been a successful move, with other papers moving to a similar paywall model.  What is certain, however, is that The Times now has a far more loyal and consistent userbase – and the certainty of revenues that brings in is incredibly valuable.

Note: graphs in this article are taken from alexa.com, which is a third-party site and may not give completely accurate visitor numbers. On other business articles, checkout the top tire shines reviews.

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