New York Times To Go Free

Now here's a strategy I love: The New York Times has decided to close TimesSelect, its paid offering that included popular columnists and archives, and will open up 20 years of archives at no cost. Previously the Times charged for archived articles. TimesSelect brought in $10 million a year in revenue, but the Times project low growth in the future versus expected general online growth. I really hate trying to get to a New York Times article and seeing a free excerpt followed by a note that the full article will cost me a few bucks. (Then again, Google can often bring up the entire article that another newspaper picked up in syndication and did not put behind a wall.)

This could be an offensive measure against possible changes at the Wall Street Journal, or it could be that Rupert Murdoch's plan to offer WSJ.com for free is a sign of the times. The Times says the decision came from the fact that "many more" readers entered the Times' website through search engines and external links (which shows the influence of agrregator new sites, blogs and word-of-mouth emails).

Comments

[Myszka]

It'll be interesting to see how this fits into the larger strategy of NYTimes.com going forward. This is a major shift from the site's (and newspaper's) focus on diversifying revenue streams as well as "premium price for premium content," a phrase that had been used to explain everything from ad rate increases to cover price increases to TimesSelect.

I'd also like to hear how Sulzberger feels today about "training a generation of readers to get quality information for free." It's really hard to imagine going back to paying $540 per year for home delivery of the newspaper, and I'm one of the people who used to do it. Advertising and then circulation for the print edition of The Times are the two biggest revenue levers for NYTCo. When that disappears, then what?

The revenues for all of the company's digital operations combined (mostly About.com, NYTimes.com and Boston.com) only make up 8% of the company's overall revenues (2006).