The Times has lost almost 90% of its online readership compared to February since making registration mandatory in June, calculations by the Guardian show*

The news is no surprise to us at all, after similar failings in the US.

The general advice from us is it just doesn’t work – internet users will not (in general) be persuaded to cough up for content which can just as easily be read for free elsewhere.

Lets imagine a world where News Corp owns all major online news properties and charges all of its readers to view the content – what will happen?

The publishing of online content luckily has a very low barrier to entry – newly developed and free news sites will take over so fast that our entire readership habits will change overnight.

The Times, and other news sites attempting to charge for online content, will really need to rethink their strategy – the web has changed everything, and as with the music industry they need to find a new way of monetising their work.

* These figures can then be used to model how this may impact on the number of users hitting the new Times site. Based on the last available ABCe data for Times Online readership (from February 2010), which showed that it had 1.2 million daily unique users, and Hitwise’s figures showing it had 15% of UK online newspaper traffic, that means a total of 332,800 daily users trying to visit the Times site.  If none of the people visiting the site have already registered, the one-on-four dropout rate means that traffic actually going from the registration site to the Times site is just 84,800, or 1.06% of total UK newspaper traffic – a 93% fall compared with May.