NY Times Goes Free With TimesSelect

Today the New York Times announced that its TimesSelect Web service will no longer be a paid subscription. This move signals further migration by traditional media into Web 2.0 form. Now most of the Web site will be freely available to readers in what appears to be a move to gain more readers.  The TimesSelect service will shut down on Wednesday after two years of paid subscriptions that brought world class content to subscribers. This is great news for me and other bloggers as the NYT is a very good source for news and interesting stories.

The Times is acknowledging that paid content is not as profitable as the ad supported model according to an article via Reuters today. The Web sites VP and GM Vivian Schiller said: "We now believe by opening up all our content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, that that will create a revenue stream that will more than exceed the subscription revenue." As we have observed previously, monetizing and promoting traditional newspapers on Web 2.0 has and will be a challenge for many companies.

It is interesting to note that TimesSelect is a profitable venture that generated about $10 million in revenue last year. So, the ad supported model would seem to be a much more profitable strategy given the Times' leading position in online traditional media. TimesSelect has nearly 250,000 paid subscribers online and Times home delivery subscribers have free access already bringing their total readership to over 750,000.

This is great news for both the Times and online readers as well. I suspected all along that most larger papers would make a complete transition at some point out of economy. The printing and distribution of traditional media is a cash cow if you think about it compared to digitalized content. This is not to say that the "hard copy" version will or should be lost in the move to the Web. However, a proportioned cutback in offline circulation can only spell profit for the company.