Has The Times' online traffic really dropped by almost 90%?

According to calculations made by the Guardian, The Times has lost almost 90% of their online readership following their introduction of a paywall in June 2010. The number of subscribers via the paywall has been estimated to be as low as 15,000 daily online users.

The Guardian quote that 'Data from the web metrics company Experian Hitwise shows that only 25.6% of such users [who have been redirected to The Times' signup page for subscriptions] sign up and proceed to a Times web page; [...] visits to the Times site have fallen to 4.16% of UK quality press online traffic, compared with 15% before it made registration compulsory on 15 June.'

At that estimation, this would only generate £120,000 per month, a stark contrast to the £240,000 The Times' print edition is losing daily, according to News International's accounts up to June 2009.

But how reliable is this data? According to Graham Hansell, Head of Strategy at Sitelynx and Hitwise Power User, "when someone goes from Timesplus.co.uk to TheTimes.co.uk in Hitwise (27% for last week), it is wrong to imply a "clicked link" relationship. All the 'up stream' and 'down stream' traffic is really telling you is the site that the visitor went to before and after, not that someone clicked on the link.

Looking at the user journey, if you click on any link on the TheTimes.co.uk homepage it takes you to Timesplus.co.uk, and clicking the back button on the browser takes you back to TheTimes.co.uk homepage.

So this 27% will be made up of people bouncing backwards and forwards between the two sites as people look for "free to access" content (clicking various articles) and then a percentage would give up. The actual payment gateway (payments.timesplus.co.uk) has no data in Hitwise and is the only real evidence of subscription. In my opinion only a third of this traffic represents subscriber activity!"

Unregistered users who are visiting www.thetimes.co.uk are currently redirected to a Times+ membership page where they have to register in order to view Times content at the current subscription rate of £1 per day or £2 per week, with an introductory offer of £1 for 30 days.

So what's the future for The Times' online readership? Industry sources say the huge drop comes as no surprise. In addition to the estimated 15,000 daily online users signing up to Times content through the paywall, there are approximately 150,000 users getting The Times online content free with their print subscription. However, as print has been consistently losing readership over the last two years, it is more than questionable if Rupert Murdoch's online paywall model is commercially viable and if other online news publishers will follow his lead.

Old Spice - I'm the man your man could smell like

Following last week’s article and the end of the Old Spice viral campaign, we have been tracking activity and video counts.

It would be an understatement to class this as an "effective" social marketing/viral campaign - in fact it worked brilliantly. In less than a week the videos racked up over 34 million views. This has been likened to the popularity of Lady Gaga's YouTube hits.

Following its first screening in the Superbowl TV ads, Old Spice turned to YouTube and social networking to push out their videos and social media.

Stephen comments: "So often companies overlook the most fundamental part of social media – being social."

This is exactly how Old Spice won their social audience over. Using Twitter, they chose to respond to their followers through videos posted on YouTube. Iain Tait, creative director of the agency Old Spice commissioned (Wieden+Kennedy), states that they chose YouTube as a platform rather than a dedicated Old Spice website simply to gain wider exposure to the videos.




So, what has the Old Spice man actually been doing, as well as "swan dives"? Some quick stats on Twitter and Facebook popularity:

•    The Twitter account launched one year ago and has 86,000 followers, 48,000 of those acquired in the last 5 days. Compare that to Stephen Fry (account since July 2008) who has 1.6 million followers.

•    Facebook has 651,000 "likes".

The question still remains: Is the huge popularity of the campaign generating an increase of sales for Proctor and Gamble, who manufacture Old Spice? There have been reports that sales of the featured product, Red Zone After Hours Body Wash, have dropped 7 percent (week ending 13th June).

The 185 (yes – Isaiah was kept busy!) Twitter video responses are refreshing, amusing and, more importantly, shareable. The videos have now ceased production as the agency decided to run for only a limited amount of whilst the media was still fresh to avoid overkill.

If you are missing Isaiah you can entertain your callers by incorporating him into your voicemail greeting!

Google has recently acquired MetaWeb to improve search

The acquisition of MetaWeb, a San Francisco-based start-up company, adds to Google's attempt to drive deeper meaning to all those keywords that it gets fed every day from crawling websites.

MetaWeb is a data collection of 12 million objects and counting that describe entities in the real world; for example, take any word and it may have different meanings depending on the context. MetaWeb uses the word 'Boston' in its onsite example - nominally a city in the US, but 'Boston' could refer to a number of cities and towns around the world or the name of a band. Each of these meanings will also be connected to different material on the web. Meta Web has been industriously cataloguing the web in an attempt to capture a deeper understanding of things and the content that goes with them.

Here is the video that MetaWeb use to explain how entities work

This is complementary to the way Google Squared analyses relationships between content that is similar and what is commonly associated with it. Allowing Google to use statistical models to build relationships, say between a product, features, pricing and so on.

Expect to see the two technologies, if not combined, then used in a complementary fashion to add levels of richness to results snippets and more suggestion mechanics in results pages in the future from Google.

Google will also continue to support MetaWeb's open database freebase allowing developers to access these objects for inclusion in their content. This no doubt builds in a virtuous circle of web content sources that Google can mine for results page material on understood entities.

Read more on deeper understanding with MetaWeb in Google's official blog.

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