Richard Perez-Pena NYTIMESThe 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.
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.
The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according
to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller
would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating
the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to
generate.
Johanna
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