News Corp.’s News International announced official paid-subscription figures for the online versions of The Times and The Sunday Times, claiming more than 105,000 paid subscribers to the sites and saying that one-half of those are monthly subscribers (including iPad and Kindle customers), with the rest made up of single-view customers.
News International added that there are also 100,000 joint print and digital subscribers to the two newspapers, bringing its total paid roll to about 200,000.
Access to content behind the sites’ paywall costs £1 ($1.60) per day or £2 ($3.20) per week, with an introductory offer of £1 for the first 30 days.
The official subscription figures come days after estimates of severe drops in unique monthly visitors and click-throughs from Nielsen and Experian Hitwise.
The Times editor Jeremy Harding told BBC Radio 4′s Today, as reported by paidContent:
Over 2 million people look at the front page of The Times. We were engaged in a quite suicidal form of economics, which was giving our news away for free. We haven’t been cut off from the conversation, because the media works as a huge echo chamber, and readers are commenting on our stories in a more engaging way.
