The New York Times was to stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight last night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh potential advertising revenue from increased traffic on a free site.
The move comes two years to the day after the Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged US$49.95 a year, or US$7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper's archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to the Times and to some students and educators.
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. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.
The Times said the TimesSelect project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers -- out of 787,000 overall -- and generating about US$10 million a year in revenue.
"But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising," said Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
What changed, the Times said, was that 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 access 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.
"What wasn't anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others," Schiller said.
The Times' site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.
Those who have paid in advance for access to TimesSelect will be reimbursed on a prorated basis.
Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said there had always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and doubts had grown along with Web traffic and online ad revenue.
"The business model for advertising revenue versus subscriber revenue is so much more attractive," he said. "The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate."
In addition, he said, the Times has been especially effective at using information it collects about its online readers to target ads to them, increasing their value to advertisers.
Many readers lamented their loss of access to the work of the 23 news and opinion columnists of the Times -- as did some of the columnists themselves. Some of those writers have such ardent followings that, even with access restricted, their work often appeared on the lists of the most e-mailed articles.
Experts say that opinion columns are unlikely to generate much ad revenue, but that they can drive a lot of reader traffic to other, more lucrative parts of the Times' site, like topic pages devoted to health and technology.
The Wall Street Journal is the only major newspaper in the country to charge for access to most of its Web site, which it began doing in 1996. The Journal has nearly 1 million paying online readers, generating about US$65 million in revenue.
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