Paywalls are in the news again, with the announcement last week that the Herald Sun is to introduce a paywall , restricting some areas of online content to subscribers.

Having instituted one for sister title The Australian last October, covered here, we thought it might be time to take a look at what happened when the Australian paywall went up, in October 2011.

Firstly, The Australian shed Visits, dropping 20.37% in their post-paywall averages. Over a three month average they totalled 4.3 million Visits, compared to 5.4million the pre-paywall.

The Australian also lost Market Share, as represented by Rank in the Experian Hitwise News & Media – Print category, dropping to 8th nationally, their lowest for 36 months.

However, was the drop consistent or was it only sections of the population not handing over credit cards?

Who didn’t want to pay?

Nationally, there’s no great change on a State by State level, so the Australian still is, Australian.

Shifts appeared at a sociographic level and appear to be centred around location: the further you were from a city centre, the more likely you were to continue using the Australian website, most likely paying to do so. I will note here that App usage is not included in this data,  as it is likely that some users have migrated to a tablet friendly version.

MOSAIC Groups A, B, C, E & F dropped in Visit Share over the 12 week period, whilst outer suburban to rural Groups D, H, I, J & K held or grew.

As seen below, the Herald Sun has group E & F as two of it’s largest contributing segments, over indexed for both. Given these dropped in Share for the Australian, the impact of the paywall is going to be interesting.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.