NY Times makes a very smart Web decision
The New York Times has decided to do away with its subscription Times Select feature, freeing its popular columnists and editorials upon the world.
It’s a win-win. The Times will reach a new and expanded audience, which will generate a lot of ad revenue. Millions of people will now be able to read their award winning columnists for free. What’s not to like?
Sure, the Times will lose out on its subscription fees –$7.95 a month or $49.95 for a year, but it will gain a lot more in ad revenue. The Times made about $10 million in revenue from Times Select last year. That’s hardly anything to sneeze at, but it’s certainly not enough to warrant limiting the freedom of your content.
First, a newspapers primary goal is to inform readers, not to make money. So, when the Times put its very talented and persuasive columnists behind its wall, it limited their ability to have an impact on the world. It was a great way of rendering those columnists, with their considerable knowledge and experience, moot.
Second, the Times Select wall was a short-term strateg, and it simply had no long-term sustainability. Sure, there were a lot of people willing to try Times Select for the chance to read nationally and internationally renowed columnists like Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd among others, but those columnists won’t be around forever.
The Times had spent years building up its op-ed page into one of the finest and best known in the world. It had a commodity that people were willing to pay for. But one day their current columnists will retire or move on. Then a new bunch will take over.
With a Times Select wall, they wouldn’t be able to become as well known or respected as current columnists at the Times. If only a limited audience can read their materials, then it limits their ability to become popular. If they aren’t popular then people aren’t willing to pay for them.
Times Select was destined to fail on that end.
But it also didn’t make sense on a third end. Times Select generated about $10 million in revenue from last year. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Times wasn’t getting that much traffic to its op-ed pages behind its wall.
According to the Reuters article:
TimesSelect had about 227,000 paying subscribers as of August. People who receive the paper at home get access to it for free, as do students. In total, about 787,400 people have access to TimesSelect now, the company said.
That’s not exactly a wide reach, and it shows little growth from when the service was launched a few years ago. I personally am a fan of Friedman’s, but haven’t read one of his columns in years because of the wall. Now, I will read his and other Times’ columnists again.
That’s a lot of page views for the Times, and it may inspire me to stay on the site longer and read other content as well. That’s a lot of potential ad dollars for the Times. I predict traffic to www.nytimes.com will show a noticable spike after the wall is taken down.
Getting people to your site is half the battle — never discourage people from coming to your site. These columns will now be widely linked to in blogs, and there will be an organic upswing in popularity of the columnists and the Times op-ed page.
These are some of the best opinion writers in the world. The blogverse will love them. But bloggers don’t link to sites that people have to pay for.
It simply makes sense to try to make as much content free as possible. It will give you a wider audience reach. If more people come to your site, they may stumble upon other stories.
Who knows how many millions of stories readers could have read if they stayed on www.nytimes.com after they read a column or op-ed piece.
The Web is a different beast than print. Never, ever turn down potential customers.