Prior to the switch, Spectator.co.uk got 40 percent of its weekly traffic on Wednesday nights and Thursday mornings - right after content from the printed mag went online for free - Ben Greenish, MD of the mag’s parent company Press Holdings Media Group, tells paidContent:UK…

“That was quite scary,” he said about the switch. “We looked at that traffic spike and thought, ‘do you know what, we’re about to write off 50 percent of that lot’. But potentially we’ve only lost about two or three percent.”

Magazine sales, too, have increased in the last six weeks, Greenish says, though that may not be paywall-related. Greenish, a former MD of Emap’s Construction division, doesn’t talk specifics—like the exact amount of unique users, for example—but he’s pleased that initial fears about the scale of losses turned out unfounded.

—Not all paid: But, to paraphrase Rupert Murdoch, this paywall doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling…

Around five full length articles are uploaded from each current issue and a selection of past articles from from the arts & culture, comment and books sections are all there to convince readers to shell out for a full subscription…

The majority of magazine content is hidden, but, when you throw in the Coffee House and individual star writers’ blogs, general readers still get quite a lot for nothing.

—Won’t work for newspapers: But Greenish is adamant about one thing: it won’t necessarily work for everyone: “The newspaper market is so different to us: we’re niche, very specialist, we don’t appeal to the general reader as they (newspapers) have to… Newspapers have a completely different problem, one of volume.” He’s certainly not urging other media to hide away magazine content from browsing non-subscribers, as the FT and News Corp (NYSE: NWS) are.

—iPhone changes coming: Greenish says downloads of the Spectator‘s 59p a week pay-as-you-go iPhone app and an online-online page-turning Exact Editions version surpassed expectations—“without marketing”, he adds.

Marketing will begin, however, in the next few weeks when the iPhone app will relaunch, dispensing with its slightly unwieldy user interface in favour of a web-style single column browser. Greenish says the mobile app proves that “micro-subscriptions” work, but the mag now needs to turn iPhone readers into annual subscribers.