NYTimes.com To Be Completely Free
Starts midnight tomorrow. :D
Quote:
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.
...
In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.
The newspaper said the TimesSelect project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
Re: NYTimes.com To Be Completely Free
TimesSelect was a foolish idea and if it "met expectations" as they say it did, their expectations must have been pretty low.
Re: NYTimes.com To Be Completely Free
Quote:
Originally Posted by GothamSpotter
TimesSelect was a foolish idea and if it "met expectations" as they say it did, their expectations must have been pretty low.
$10 million for only an enhanced offering (access to columnists and some archives) sounds pretty good to me.
Now if they pulled a Wall Street Journal and didn't have anything available for free and had the same expectations, that would be different.
Re: NYTimes.com To Be Completely Free
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winglets747
$10 million for only an enhanced offering (access to columnists and some archives) sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah, but the columnists hated it, and apparently the business people think there's more than $10 million to be made by targeting ads on the Opinion section (which was ad-free during the TimesSelect experiment).
