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Data from Experian Hitwise reveals that the market share of the The Times and The Sunday Times websites has nearly halved since News International introduced a registration wall and separate sites for the two titles.

Payment-only access is expected to be introduced later this month.

According to Hitwise, the titles' combined market share of UK internet visits to news and media websites has dropped from 4.37% in the week ending 22 May to 2.67% for the week ending 19 June.

Hitwise data shows the sites have lost further eyeballs since traffic has been redirected from timesonline.co.uk to the new sites, thetimes.co.uk and thesundaytimes.co.uk last week. The research claims that as of 23 June, the websites' share of the market had fallen to 1.81%.

News International declined to comment on the Experian Hitwise figures.

News International has already stopped publishing figures through the industry standard currency ABCe, which today (Thursday) reported that five other national newspaper sites grew their global traffic between May and June.

Using the ABCe's preferred measure, daily average browsers, Guardian.co.uk, the network that includes The Guardian and The Observer content, registered 2.01 million average daily browsers in May.

The figure represented a 9.4% rise from April, an uplift that only Mirror Group Digital could surpass.

Mirror Group Digital, which includes the Daily Mirror website, achieved the highest month-on-month growth, rising 13.7% to 502,382 average daily browsers in May.

However, Mirror Digital is still a relative minnow compared to the market-leading MailOnline, which remained the most-visited website for the fifth consecutive month.

MailOnline, the Daily Mail's website, attracted 2.39 million average daily browers in May, up 1% on April.

Telegraph.co.uk was up 5.1% to 1.66 million on the month and is ranked third behind the Guardian.co.uk and MailOnline.

Alexander Lebedev's Independent.co.uk was up 5.9% to 481,954 average daily browsers.