The Times readership goes down by 27 percent

Posted by Clara Martínez Turco on August 17, 2010 at 4:56 PM

Combined traffic to The Times and The Sunday Times websites has fallen to 1.61 million visits in July, from 2.22 million in June and 2.79 million in May, according to comScore's latest findings, Media Week reported yesterday.

News International, which owns the newspapers, was expecting its readership to decline dramatically as it began charging for online content in July, New Media Age reminded.

However, comScore numbers revealed "a better performance than many predicted," The Independent explained, as media experts had forecast losses of more than 84 percent.

According to the study, readers are spending an average of four minutes per visit in the websites down from the 7.6 minutes in May. Page views have also decreased from 29 million in May to 9 million in July.

The Times websites are not the only dailies who have lost traffic in the past two months. comScore showed that Guardian.co.uk declined from 5.22 million visits in June to 4.65 million in July while the Telegraph Media Group went from 5.1 million visits to 4.26 million, Media Week revealed.

Meanwhile, the Mail Online remains the most popular news site in the UK with nine million unique visits.