Mail Online

Stats: how social media brought down The Sun paywall

On 30th November 2015 The Sun paywall will come crumbling down.

It’s fairly obvious why Rebekah Brooks made the decision; publishers are nothing without the reach of social media and this U-turn perhaps proves that subscription models need to be flexible, balanced carefully with (increasingly native) advertising revenue.

Pageviews are the oxygen that keeps every revenue flame burning. But rather than me harping on about advertising and social media, I thought I’d tell the story of The Sun paywall in statistics alone. Here we go…

BBC is the most shared UK news outlet on Twitter, Mail Online is fifth

The BBC and The Guardian are the most dominant UK news outlets in terms of the number of shares on Twitter, according to new data from PeerIndex.

UK Twitter users shared just over 4.2m articles from BBC News in January 2014, which apparently resulted in more than 100bn potential impressions of BBC content to Twitter users globally.

In comparison, content from The Guardian was shared 2.4m times via Twitter while The Telegraph came in third with 913,000 shares.

The research also shows the negative impact that paywalls have on social sharing, as The New York Times is the only paid-for online publications to make the top 10. For more on The NYT’s business model, read our report on its recent native advertising trial.

Are there any serious lessons to be learnt from Mail Online’s content strategy?

Despite its reputation, Mail Online is the world’s most popular online newspaper, which must also make it the world’s ultimate guilty pleasure.

Often those who visit the site are dubious about the news value, yet the images of half-dressed celebs and salacious gossip keep them coming back for more.

The Mail has perhaps been forced to adopt this model as it needs to chase pageviews above all else in order to maximise its ad revenue.

The only other realistic option is to duck behind a paywall, but it’s not difficult to find celebrity gossip elsewhere on the internet, so it’s doubtful that this would be a profitable strategy.

But is the Mail’s enduring popularity something that brand marketers can learn from?

I took a look at its content strategy to find out…