Herald & Times, run by Gannett’s Newsquest, will begin requiring metered payments for its HeraldScotland.com news site by year’s end.
“The industry has generally been kidding themselves when it talks about ‘monthly uniques’. Our key metric is not monthly uniques, it’s repeat visitors,” digital director Mark Smith tells The Drum.
MD Tim Blott: “We’ve got to a position where we believe where we can introduce registration, which is starting to catch up. Now we can start to look at content and get more involved in that content, which is where we are now. By the end of the year we believe that we will have a sufficiently engaged audience who will then be prepared to start paying.”
HeraldScotland.com got 892,925 monthly uniques in December 2010, according to ABC.
Blott and Smith said they would avoid the position of Guardian.co.uk and Mail Online, which, they said, is that “their website it all important and the print product is less important”.