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The Sun attracts 117,000 paying subscribers to its Sun+ digital service

The Sun has attracted 117,000 paying subscribers to its £2-a-week digital service Sun+ since erecting a paywall around its website on 1 August. News UK's tabloid, the UK's biggest selling paper, reached 100,000 digital subscribers in four months – it took stablemates the Times and Sunday Times a year to reach the same level of paying customers after their online content went behind a paywall in 2010.

"No one else has sought to charge for digital access to a mass audience newspaper, and, though it's early days, we are encouraged by the strong start achieved by the Sun," said David Dinsmore, editor of The Sun. Dinsmore said the Sun was not looking to target overseas users like the Daily Mail and admitted the publisher's social media strategy has not been coherent enough to date. "In reality our marketplace is very much the UK at the moment, we have 60 million people here to focus on," he said. "We are in the process of hiring a social media team, we have been remiss [in this area] in the past. It has been an ad hoc affair. We are a product across all platforms and it is key to have that social-media marketing opportunity.

"It is early days and we are still bottoming out what we want to do, we have a number of successful individuals [on Twitter], good things to build on, but we want to see something much more structured." News UK revealed some details of the subscriber base of Sun+. 

• The biggest single group (30%) are 25 to 34, which Katie Vanneck-Smith, chief marketing officer at News UK, said "blows out the myth young people won't pay for [digital] content".
• Almost half (47%) of sign-ups for the paid service are via mobile devices, which Vanneck-Smith said was slightly surprising as there had been an expectation that the service might be initially more popular on desktop computers, given the typical print Sun reader's profile.

Sun+ subscribers are split 60/40 between men and women, although this is expected to balance out to an extent once the football promotion slows down, and there is a "slight" London bias to sign ups, with the capital's denizens considered to be early adopters. Not surprisingly, the Sun's almost 30 million online unique user base plummeted following the introduction of the paywall, as users sought out free alternatives.

• The Times and Sunday Times saw almost 90% of web traffic evaporate after the introduction of a paywall in 2010.
• In October, News UK revealed that the number of digital subscribers to the Times and Sunday Times had topped 150,000.

News UK chief executive Mike Darcey, who joined from BSkyB nearly a year ago December, has aggressively pursued digital sports rights deals to bolster the Sun's online offering. First up in January was a £30m-plus deal for Premier League internet and mobile highlights – outbidding former employer BSkyB as well as O2 and Perform Group.

This was followed by a four-year deal for the digital FA Cup rights, and last month the publisher secured the digital clip rights to highlights of Champions League and Europa League matches in a joint deal with BT Sport. The Sun had an average daily circulation of 2.089m in November, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures published on Friday. However, the Sun has been overtaken for the first time as the biggest selling Saturday paper, with the Daily Mail's edition on that day averaging 2,474,439 in November. The Sun's Saturday edition averaged 2,453,981.