Back in February, we covered the Herald Sun’s announcement that they were introducing a paywall.

Just last week, Fairfax announced a raft of changes, including the erection of paywalls for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.

With it now months since the Herald Sun’s announcement, not to mention the Australian Financial Review relaxing their paywall last December, we wondered what this might suggest for Fairfax.

Firstly, as many a media baron has seen around the world, a paywall changes user behaviour.

Prior to their Paywall announcement, The Herald Sun were averaging 3.4 million Australian Visits a week, dropping almost 20% to 2.7 million for the week ending 23 June 2012.

Contrastingly, The Australian Financial Review has seen a 34% lift in Visits since relaxing their paywall in December 2011, rising from an average 59,000 visits per week prior to the announcement to 79,000 per week post the announcement.

Online readership of The Herald Sun post paywall can be predicted by where you live

Notably, the change for the Herald sun isn’t contained to Visits alone. Stranger yet, it’s similar to what we saw with Facebook – usage of the site is a behaviour that can be mapped to where you live.

Essentially,  MOSAIC groups furthest from the CBD (Blue) are those most likely to have shown continued and growing use of the Herald Sun since the paywall was announced, whilst those least likely are the inner suburban dwellers (RED), all of whom showed a drop. Not unlikely when you consider the range of news options for city dwellers compared to country and the urban fringe.

This could pose issues for publishers however, as many an advertiser is specifically interested in segments of the population with higher disposable incomes – Groups A, B, C, D and F in particular.

Interestingly, the impact of these changes and the recent journalist strikes, most notably in an increase of syndicated content, is driving more users to independent sources of information – both Crikey and The Conversation are on 52 week highs in terms of Visitation.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.