Tomorrow will be the first day online news junkies can read whatever they like on the New York Times website, absolutely free. The Gray Lady will do away with TimesSelect, its subscription-model premium content wall, at midnight. From The NY Times:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

According to that same article, the yearly revenue generated by TimesSelect was $10 million, but consider that “The Times has been especially effective at using information it collects about its online readers to aim ads specifically to them,” and it makes way more sense for the NYT to free up that premium content for all the targeted page views they can promise advertisers instead.

Mathew Ingraham agrees that this is a good move for the Times, noting that “if it even manages to sell a few ads on archived pages, it will exceed the amount of money it made by charging for its archives.” Combining the sheer volume of content available in the New York Times archives with the volume of traffic that search engines drive to the site, I think that hypothesis will prove correct.

Here’s Jeff Jarvis’s take on it, which I’m reading as a prophesy of sorts for the death of all paid content online:

But now everyone else in the content business can learn from the Times’ mistake. Rupert Murdoch has publicly toyed with the idea of taking down the pay wall around the Wall Street Journal online; I’d bet the odds of that just increased. If the Times and the Journal stop charging — and the Economist just took down its wall — then I’d have to imagine that the Financial Times will have to follow suit.

It’s not an implausible future, and maybe the Times will indeed spur a free-access WSJ (it would certainly be a pro-capitalist move, presuming the page views revenue would exceed the subscriber revenue for the WSJ). I can’t help but wonder if Google News’ recent entry into the online publishing world will also help accelerate some of these changes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 8:19 am and is filed under Advertising: Online, Publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.