New York Times Ends Paid Content

The New York Times had already announced this would happen, but now the time is here: The company will cease its TimesSelect service, introduced in 2005, and make all of its content available to readers free of charge. According to a letter posted on its site, New York Times TimesSelect subscribers--there were 227,000 subscribers--will be receiving a prorated refund for outstanding subscriptions. The service cost $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, and supplied access to all Times Columnists and to the newspaper's archives.

Vivian Schiller, general manager of NYTimes.com, notes that the change comes as a result of the change in how people get news online. She goes on to say "readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs, and other online sources."

Certainly, removing the virtual wall that has kept a fair amount of Times content from the masses is a good thing: It will make linking, mixing, and even mashing up content easier in the Web 2.0 world. I must admit I never upped the ante for the Times in the last two years--making do with what I could get on a day-to-day basis or what was free even after it was published (many travel articles, for instance, remained free). Sure, I lamented that I rarely got to read the Metropolitan Diary anymore (I'd never remember to look for it on the But, I have to wonder what this means for content producers in the long haul: The Times was one of the few high-profile subscription models around (the ongoing king: The Wall Street Journal Online, which continues to command a whopping $79 for its annual access).

I'll be interested to see what the opening up of Times does for the dissemination and visibility of its content. Will more content end up climbing the ranks of Digg.com, and get link traffic from other blogs? Will NYTimes.com get more ad revenue and see increased traffic thanks to the change, enough so to offset the $10 million it says it earned a year in revenue from the subscriptions? Only time will tell. But some pundits, included the one cited in the Times' own article on the change, believe the ad market is strong enough to do so--and that advertising will trump the subscriber model in the end.

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