LONDON -- Tabloid newspaper The Sun will eliminate its website paywall and offer most of its content for free starting Nov. 30, in an effort to compete with rivals in the free advertising market such as Mail Online.
Rebekah Brooks, who recently returned to News UK as CEO, notified her staff of the change on Friday morning, the company confirmed to Mashable.
The Sun has also recruited Keith Poole, managing editor of MailOnline in the U.S., to help with the transition.
Brooks delivered the paywall strategy in August 2013 before she left News UK amid the phone-hacking scandal.
Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been experimenting with tearing down their paywalls, and some big UK media brands remain behind them -- News UK's The Times and the Nikkei's Financial Times.
The Sun has been tweaking its paywall strategy since July, freeing up some of its main news stories, high-profile columnists and some sports stories.
It found that this increased average daily browser numbers to about 1 million. But that's still quite lower than MailOnline's 13.4 million in September.
Before the paywall went up, the Sun saw 1.9 million daily average visitors in July.
Brooks told staff in an email:
“Entering this new chapter for the Sun, we are in a strong position thanks to the many learnings we bring from the paid-for era. We know more about our readers than ever before. Our recent acquisition of Unruly, and our ongoing collaboration with colleagues at Storyful, further bolsters our position and will play a big role in how we supercharge our digital advertising capabilities.”