Who is going beyond the Murdoch paywall 3 months in

I posted about this at the start back in July here and here. Now Peter Preston has written in today's Observer an article about numbers and types of people venturing behind The Times paywall in the first 3 months.

Fleet Street is gagging to discover whether Mr M has shot himself in the foot. Interim answer, from the heavyweight Nielsen company: foot still attached to leg. They reckon that total unique monthly UK visitors to the Times site went down from 3,096,000 to 1,782,000 when the wall went up, and that only 362,000 – about 20% – ventured on to pages beyond the wall. You can weave webs of relative triumph or disaster from all this. The good news for News International is that those who vaulted the wall were a bit older, richer and more dedicated to scanning the site carefully. They are the "engaged readers" advertisers admire – as opposed to the click-by-night trade who never stop to buy anything. The bad news is that a few hundred thousand unique visitors sounds pretty puny compared with the 20 million or so the Times was claiming before the wall went up. If you want a guess in the fog, 362,000 "engaged" UK readers was broadly what the Mail (a believer in a web without walls) found a year or so ago when it took a 30m unique visitor monthly total and whittled away overseas callers and click-by-nighters. By those lights, the Times's great wall isn't a flop, nor yet a necessarily a glowing path to future riches. But there's something worthwhile left to work with, so start counting the ads.

Back in July I compared the two models, the paywall from The Times and the traffic driven site from The Mail. Well 3 months on into the Murdoch paywall and it seems that both models are producing about the same number of engaged users.