The Times website: Top people pay £2 a week for this

It's get your calculator out time, if you want to have a shot at understanding what the Times 105,000 paywall number means. Roy Greenslade made a start earlier today, but a bit more intelligence from Wapping means that we can have a go at working out how big the first wave paywall business is. Deep breath, then.

The 105,000 in fact refers to the number of "paid-for customer sales to date", and is cumulative. Pay £1 to access the site on Monday, do the same on Tuesday, and you that's two towards your 105,000. News Corporation obviously wanted to put out a six figure number, because the true figure of current paying subs is marginally less than half, at about 50,000.

Then you want to try and break down that 50k. Let's start with iPad and the small number of Kindle subs. These are the geeks and they should pay £9.99 a month, although in fact people who signed up in July then got two months free and were billed again only in October. These are somewhere around the 10,000 to 15,000 mark, and let's assume that they all stay as paying customers despite the initial special offer.

So the geeks are worth – gross – about £120 a year per person. Take the midpoint of the range and that is 12,500 and totalled up that's £1.5m. I'm told by Apple pundits that Apple takes about 30% for itself, but you are not going to get good info on the exact commercial arrangement between News and Apple. Assume only that it would be reasonable to speculate that the publisher's turnover is not quite as high as the gross of what the customer pays (no doubt there are bank fees as well).

Incidentally, the low-sounding number is not actually reflective of total iPad usage. When the Times titles went behind the paywall, the iPad and online fees were charged separately. Now you can get the iPad bundled in if you subscribe online, and given that the total charge of online amounts to £2 a week or £8.66 a month, you can assume that anybody with an eye for value is now signing up online first.

Anyway, then there are the people paying online - 35,000 to 40,000. There are two kinds – the dedicated Times fans who are on the £2-a-week deal. And the slackers, who have paid a mere £1 for 30 days of cheap viewing and may not bother to sign up for the real deal thereafter. I gather, though, that the slacker base is small – in, roughly speaking, the 5,000 to 10,000 range.

Having watched the Big Lebowski (again) on Sky Plus last night, it is safe to conclude that there is a fairly constant supply of slackers everywhere, prepared to sign up for a trial. This number might drop a bit during the year, so let's assume that there are, in any one month, 5,000 slackers who pay £1 and sign off. Annualise this and you get a slacker base worth only £60,000 a year – in short, little more than a rounding error.

So, that leaves the groupies. Knock off the geeks and the slackers, and there are 37,500, and they pay £8.66 a month - but because they do so online there are no payments to Apple, just any card processing fees to Visa or what have you. Before those kick in, then, you have a base of online groupies worth, wait for it, £104 a year or when all added up, £3.9m.

Add it all up then, and it's:

Geeks £1.5m

Slackers: £60,000

Groupies: £3.9m

So the total is £5.5m a year, gross.

Hmm, given that the advertising revenue lost could be in the £10m to £20m range, that suggests there is a long way to go. And while at the present print sales are holding steady (see my notes last night on this), if print declines again, the picture darkens further.

A print customer who buys the Times and Sunday Times every day is worth £26 a month (which is how the ABC measures them) – so lose 10,000 on the audited numbers and that's £3.1m headed south. Any way you look at it, keeping print customers remains more important than winning new online ones, well if you believe in short term revenues anyway.

One final thought, though. Wapping released one other figure. Some 100,000 people who subscribe to the Times and have it delivered have also activated their digital subscription – which is about 70% of the total subscription base. This shows the power of bundling – all that would be necessary would be to increase the price of the subscription by a few pounds a month to encompass the online add on and suddenly far larger 'online' revenues would emerge.

It is still far too soon to judge the Times paywall experiment. What is clear is that there is a long way to go when it comes to pure-play digital subscriptions, but News Corporation is prepared to wait a long time to see how it plays out.