Peter Preston 

Cracks appear in the Wapping paywall as the readership figures flood in

Peter Preston: The Times and Sunday Times's online audience is not only smaller than their free-access rivals' – it's worse than the FT manages with its porous paywall system
  
  

Financial Times and Telegraph in newsagent
The Financial Times and the Telegraph: doing well with different kinds of paywall. Photograph: James Powell for the Observer Photograph: James Powell/Observer

Once upon an early paywall time, Rupert Murdoch built castle walls around the Times and Sunday Times – and pulled up the drawbridge. But now, via Google and sundry searches, that wall is developing cracks.

And you can see why from the latest NRS Padd survey findings, which put print and digital newspaper readership in the UK together. The Telegraphs, daily and Sunday, with no paywall in Britain as yet (though a £1.99 version is coming in overseas) have 7,934,000 individual print readers a month and 5,977,000 online readers. The Guardian and Observer have 4,923,000 in print and 6,713,000 online. But though the Times and Sunday Times have 7,934,000 followers in print, only 675,000 online readers make it over the wall, and that drags down News International titles' ratings hugely.

Now, it's absolutely fair enough to point out that Mr Murdoch's contenders get money from their wall, while competitors have to rely (not always fruitfully) on ads alone. But the killer figure here is the one for the FT, whose long-established but slightly porous paywall (plus big subscription numbers) sees 895,000 readers come calling each month. Drawbridge Wapping wins neither as revenue raiser nor digital apostle: which is why, one guesses, the policy is changing.

 

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