The New York Times Co will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its website available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue. TimesSelect will shut down on Wednesday, two years after the Times launched it, which charges subscribers $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year to read articles by well-known columnists like Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman.
The trademark orange "T's" marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night, said the website's Vice President and General Manager Vivian Schiller. "We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue," he said.
The move, Reuters reported, is an acknowledgment by the New York Times that making website visitors pay for content would not bring in as much money as making it available for free and supporting it with advertising. Figuring out how to increase online revenue is crucial to the Times and other US newspaper publishers, which are struggling with a drop in advertising sales and paying subscribers as more readers move online, the Reuters report said.
"Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur. "The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."
The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper. Most US news websites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is the Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based website, the Reuters report observed.
Among other newspapers, Pearson PLC's Financial Times charges for access to some of its website, and the Wall Street Journal has the largest paid online base with about 1 million users, but that strategy is also being reconsidered and could be one of several changes under the Journal's new owner, Rupert Murdoch, whose media conglomerate News Corp has agreed to buy Dow Jones & Co for $5 billion, an Associated Press report said.
TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors. The company expects to record a "substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site" once TimesSelect disappears, it said in a statement.
TimesSelect includes online access to 23 news and opinion columnists as well as several tools to customise the website. It also offers access to the Times archives back to 1851. Starting on Wednesday, access to the archives will be available for free back to 1987, and as well as stories before 1923, which are in the public domain, Schiller said. Users can buy articles between 1923 and 1986 on their own or in 10-article packages, the company said. Some stories, such as film reviews, will be free, she said.
"The Times should be commended for experimenting with TimesSelect, but limiting access to high-profile columnists isn't the right approach," Merrill Brown, an industry consultant and former editor of the MSNBC network, said before the announcement. "To sell more advertising, the Times' website needs as many viewers as it can get."
