Monday, 25 January 2016

(39) Sun website traffic falls by more than 5% despite axing of paywall

Link: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/21/sun-website-traffic-paywall-december

The Sun website attracted some 1.5 million daily unique browsers in December
 
Summary:
 
The Sun saw a more than 5% fall in its audience in December, despite dropping its paywall fully for the first time on 30 November. A spokesperson attributed the decline to “certain apps being turned off to unify the Sun online presence and the expected seasonal lull in Dream Team”. However, the Sun outperformed the rest of the UK’s national newspapers, which saw bigger falls during the month, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Their Christmas traffic declines followed gains made in November, which were partly driven by public interest in stories such as the Paris attacks.
 
Key data/statistical information:
 
  • Most national newspaper websites suffer double-digit traffic falls in December, except Mail Online and dailystar.co.uk
  • theguardian.com fell from an average of more than 9 million daily unique browsers in November to just under 8 million, a drop of 15%
  • the Telegraph slid to 4.1 million after losing almost 1 million unique browsers, equivalent to almost 20% of its audience
  • Mail Online lost just under 10% of its audience to drop back to just over 13 million unique browsers
  • dailystar.co.uk lost 8.8% of its unique browsers to come in at just under 600,000 a day
 
What's my view?
 
Despite taking down the paywall, the sun still falls because we are living in the era where not that much read the news. People prefer getting up to date with the world through social networking sites such as Twitter and Instagram. The decrease in unique browsers is not something to be shocked by as time passes, the number of people reading the news will continue to decrease.


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