In May, I noted that Rupert Murdoch's Times Online and Sun Online were clamping down on traffic stats in advance of putting up a paywall.

In retrospect the move appears to have been adept, especially when you consider the post-paywall traffic decline of more than 1.2 million readers from the two papers.

MediaWeek's Sarah Shearman reports:

In May, the free-to-access website Timesonline.co.uk attracted 2.79 million unique users in the UK, a slight increase on the level of the previous three months.

News International launched its separate Thetimes.co.uk and Thesundaytimes.co.uk websites on 25 May. It made registration compulsory and began redirecting users from the old site on 15 June and started charging for access to both sites on 2 July.

According to ComScore, the combined number of unique visitors to the two new sites has fallen to 1.61 milion in July, from 2.22 million in June, and 2.79 million in May.

The average number of minutes each user spent on the site was 7.6 in May, 5.8 in June and 4 in July.

Page views have dropped from 29 million in May to 20 million in June and 9 million in July.

News International has run an introductory offer offering subscribers 30 days' access for £1. Its basic pricing is £1 for a day's access to The Times and The Sunday Times and £2 for a week, while subscribers to each newspaper get free access to the related website.

No indications have yet emerged from the company as to how many people have subscribed or how much revenue subscriptions have generated.

The figures relating to dwell time and page impressions on the site suggest the actual number of subscribers is much lower than the 1.6 million recorded by ComScore, with many people accessing the homepage and then moving on, adding to the overall unique users but drastically reducing average time spent on site.