The New York Times pay for content service bites the dust

by Emily Price Sep 18th 2007

As of midnight tonight the New York Times pay to view Select Service is no longer. The Times began the subscription service exactly 2-years ago and charged users $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month for the ability to access specific content online. Overall they managed to get 227,000 paid subscribers which made for a profit of close to $10 million a year.

In their announcement the Times said more users were now coming to the site via search engines and links on other sites than they were at the service's launch. These users couldn't get to the content (since they were not subscribers) but were unlikely to pay for it just to check out one piece on content. By allowing everyone access, the New York Times stands to dramatically increase their page views and make more money in advertising revenue than they were off of subscription fees. For those subscribers who have already shelled out some cash for Time Select the NYT is planning to reimburse them on a prorated basis.

What do you think about the Times decision to drop their subscriber service? Could this be the beginning of the end for subscriber based web content?

[via TechCrunch]

Tags: new york times, newspaper, NewYorkTimes, nyt, paid content, PaidContent, subscriber service, SubscriberService

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

telecommatt said 8:22AM on 9-18-2007

It's about freaking time! I actually started excluding NYT from my search results. Besides that, most of their stories are avail via podcast...

Gardiner Westbound said 9:18AM on 9-18-2007

I remove sites requiring a paid subscription from my list of bookmarks. There are too many information sources to be hamstrung by the occasional greedy one.

james 42 said 9:54AM on 9-18-2007

Paid content will still exist (like, um, porn maybe?) but there will be precious few news sites that will be able to make it work. Probably only highly specialized sites where there is no alternative.

Brian McBride said 12:02PM on 9-18-2007

Paid subscription is fine, as long as the content is so special or unique you want to pay for it. Like maybe some of those places you get unlimited access to music, or Netflix movies, etc...

But news? Yea, not when dozens of sites put the same news up for free. At that point, your just paying for their point of view on the news.

In the end, if they make more than 10mil from advertising vs. the subscription, then go for it!

Ypoknons said 11:25PM on 9-23-2007

The South China Morning Post had better follow...

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