New York Times online traffic dips since paywall debut

by David Silverberg

New figures released this week found NYTimes.com traffic dropping since the company introduced a paywall on March 28. Its share of American pageviews for all newspaper websites decreased from 13 percent in March to 10.6 percent in April, its lowest share in 12 months, according to a study from ComScore, as reported by AdAge.

The study discovered pageviews on NYTimes.com from March to April declined 24.4 percent.

The ComScore study supports analysis by Hitwise, which announced in early April that traffic to NYTimes.com slowed by up 15 percent “most days during the 12 days following the paywall’s launch, compared to days during the previous period,” PaidContent reports.

A New York Times Co. spokeswoman was quick to point how many news sites saw a traffic decline this month due to the high volume of news traffic in March, due to major events such as the tsunami in Japan. “Despite that, and given that this is the first month where you can see the traffic patterns post-digital subscription launch, these are actually better numbers than our internal projections,” she told AdAge.

Also, Times execs said during its first-quarter conference call in late April 1 that it had already added 100,000 subscribers. What has yet to be determined is if those subscribers will continue their membership after the 99-cent introductory rate soon ends.