Informed Speculation

With all apologies to Bob Dylan (fresh off his poorly received closing of last weekend’s Austin City Limits Festival), the NY Times has just confirmed the long-rumored death of TimesSelect, and even opened up its archive for the last twenty years for free:

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.

The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $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 project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

Well, I don’t have any idea if that’s good or bad (though the Wall Street Journal, we learn from the article, has 1,000,000 paid subscribers to its online edition, earning $65 million annually), but the Times gets 13 million unique visitors a month, and God knows how many page views (probably at least 30 million at a bare minimum, and I’m sure it’s much higher).   Their page views and visitors will now rise again (and their columnists will be much happier) and they’re obviously betting that they can monetize their views more than enough to offset the loss of subscriber revenue:

Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm, said that there have always been reasons to question the pay model for news sites, and that doubts have 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 aim ads specifically 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.

Mostly, though, it’s a bonanza for conservative bloggers, as we now once again have MoDo, Frank Rich, and Paul Krugman to bash when we’re fresh out of other ideas…