Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler
NYTimes.Com Changes Strategy
Nytimes.com has added a significant paid subscription feature called "TimesSelect." Nytimes.com has had several paid areas for several years including archives and the crossword puzzle areas of the site. I will not bother describing TimesSelect, but am providing a link of an article from crack writer Tim Gray of internetnews.com which gives you all you need to know about this nytimes initiative.
I applaud the New York Times on continuing to use a mix of paid and free content on nytimes.com. The strategy is a clear winner and one that Dow Jones should have employed 8 years ago when they took wsj.com to a totally paid subscription environment.
Sites that have the cache of nytimes.com can get away with adding paid subscription areas. It comes down to the concept of "like to have information" vs. "need to have information." Internet users will only pay for "need to have" information. And that is trick and the risk. If a publisher is going to take previously free information and turn it into paid information, that publisher best be sure that the material in question is "need to have."
Time will tell if the New York Times' TimesSelect service is "need to have." I like the idea of the mix of paid and free, but I am not sure TimesSelect is really "need to have" information.
Oy, I have to disagree with you on this one, Alan. This is going to radically reduce the Times' impact online, and open up the field for other newspaper sites to be "The Web's Newspaper."
Penny-ante paywalls are so...ghetto. The Times is the one paper that can take on the Manhattan Project of the online world: creating an online advertising model that works for someone other than Google.
The LA Times recently made freely available their online "Calendar Live" section on the LATimes.com site. It had basically been their attempt to "mine" the entertainment industry pros who "need to have" all the local information on the various performing arts, films, movies, etc. Frankly, I thought that charging for "Calendar Live" was a good idea and that the Times had wisely identified what online material people would pay additional money to read. But, maybe a lack of free access to all sections of latimes.com was negatively affecting its online readership as a whole (if you are in the entertainment industry and are part of the vast majority who don't need access to all related information, you might have thought, "why bother with the LA Times and pay for Calendar Live, when I can get the LA Weekly for free?").
I would love to have access to the NYT archives; I'd recommend that the Times consider a reasonable monthly subscription rate that would allow individuals to access all past articles in the library; The Times could probably pull a much broader range of archive users (me) in that way rather than going by pay-per-article. The NYT currently allows users to buy individual articles from the archives or buy a "pack," a buy-in-bulk system which makes one feel like he is buying beer rather than "background. :)"
Anyway, as for the NYT new pay-per-read section, I am a little bit skeptical that it will come across as "need to have" information.