News Corp loses 4 million readers due to paid news online, but it's not bad

According to the statistics provided by comScore the Times UK website saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. News Corp reported that since it put its newspapers other than the Wall Street Journal, behind a paywall: The Times of London and the Sunday Times, it has signed up 105,000 paying subscribers, plus another 100,000 who were already subscribers to the print newspaper.

Data from comScore show that pageviews declined by 90% from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. However, it is unlikely that such a decline had indeed a disastrous effect on the company revenues.

Here is what TechCrunch suggests: “Before we pile on here, let’s take a look at those numbers. Basically, those 50,000 monthly subscribers are paying $12.80 a month, or $640,000 a month total. Let’s say the other 55,000 pay-as-you-read crowd is generating another $160,000 a month in subscription revenues (I am being generous here and assuming two days a month per person at $1.60 per day). That comes to $800,000 a month, or $9.6 million a year in online subscription revenues.

“What did they give up in online advertising revenues? At 41 million estimated pageviews a month, assuming a $5 CPM (cost-per-thousand-impressions), that was only $200,000 a month in online advertising revenues. I am not counting the Sunday Times site here, but the lion’s share of the traffic went to the Times UK site. Maybe the average CPMs were higher if the online ads were bundled together with more expensive print ads, but in order to match its paltry subscription revenues the Times online ads would have to command a $20 CPM, which is really high for a general news site.”