At midnight tonight, the New York Times will stop charging $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month for access to some of its content. The newspaper says:
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.
So why didn't it work out?
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.
"What wasn't anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others," Ms. Schiller said.
Hm, well, search engine traffic brings people with little interest in and no loyalty to the paper. As visitors they are more or less worthless, so you might as well try to get something from advertising.
The story points out that the LA Times has already dropped a similar scheme, though the Financial Times persists.
Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis pours scorn on the effort on his blog, BuzzMachine, saying:
The bottom line is that the staff of the Times online did the best it could with TimesSelect, creating the richest service they could and probably garnering the largest paying clientèle possible -- but still, it was a bad idea from the start. It turned out to be one expensive experiment, one bad investment.
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.
