New York Times frees its content – Wall Street Journal may be next

In the past, I’ve posted links to arti­cles in the New York Times in this blog. I read the Times’ web site sev­eral times a week. I got into the Times Web habit in 1995, actu­ally. It beats wait­ing for the Sun­day Hon­olulu Adver­tiser to reprint dated, abridged ver­sions of the same articles.

There was always one prob­lem with link­ing to the Times – their archiv­ing pol­icy. After two weeks, most recent Times news sto­ries shifted from free access to subscriber-only access through a paid ser­vice called Times Select. Launched in 2005, Times Select was a bold rev­enue play on a web site that cur­rently attracts 13 mil­lion unique vis­i­tors each month.

Author­i­ta­tive news has its price

When I pointed users or stu­dents to a New York Times arti­cle, I wasn’t ask­ing them to sub­scribe to the Times or buy the arti­cle. Read­ers didn’t like pay­ing US$50 a year to use the Times archives. Yes, print sub­scribers received a free Web sub­scrip­tion, as did some edu­ca­tional sub­scribers. The Times also deter­mined that more Web read­ers were fol­low­ing links from Google, Yahoo and other search engines to Times con­tent. If the user wasn’t a Times sub­scriber, they might not see the Times con­tent or ads.

Keep in mind that adver­tis­ing helps sub­si­dize much of the alleged “free” con­tent on the Web. The band­width required to con­nect users to a web server can be expense at times. The servers, pro­gram­ming, and other ser­vices required to keep even a small web site going cost money.

Adver­tis­ing, in turn, helps fuel elec­tronic com­merce. It’s far less expen­sive for an elec­tronic mer­chant to adver­tise online, espe­cially when the ads can be tar­geted to spe­cific web­sites, users, and geo­gra­phies. Cus­tomers who will con­sider an online mer­chant are more likely to read their news on the Web in the first place. It’s expen­sive to con­vert read­ers of print news­pa­pers or tele­vi­sion view­ers to an online busi­ness model.

I run ads at the bot­tom of my site’s web pages more as an exper­i­ment than any­thing else. The rev­enue that I receive is laugh­ably small, but I don’t pay that much for my web host­ing at DreamHost, either. Google announced today that it is expand­ing its adver­tis­ing busi­ness to mobile plat­forms, and other Web adver­tis­ing ser­vices are mov­ing in the same direction.

In the end, man­age­ment deter­mined that the Times would be bet­ter off with­out its sub­scrip­tion ser­vice, let­ting these read­ers read sto­ries for free while view­ing adver­tis­ing sold by the Times.

Free the con­tent – sell more ads

The Times announced today that Times Select will end tomor­row. Web site vis­i­tors will get free access to sec­tions of the Times’s news and col­umn archives, includ­ing the last twenty years. Boing­Bo­ing and Kaaawa blog iLind.net ran a quick men­tion of the change as well.

The Wall Street Jour­nal may be the next major news daily to free its Web con­tent. The Journal’s subscriber-only poli­cies were more expen­sive and more restric­tive than the Times’. The Jour­nal are also one of the few news­pa­pers that made money from its Web oper­a­tions– at least US$50 mil­lion in sub­scriber rev­enue each year, accord­ing to this arti­cle in ZDNet. New owner Rupert Mur­doch is already push­ing MySpace towards tar­geted adver­tis­ing based on user pro­file data, accord­ing to this NY Times arti­cle (via Boing­Bo­ing). I would not be sur­prised if the Jour­nal and Dow Jones changed their busi­ness models.

Tagged as: advertising, content, free, mobile, new-york, research, revenue, ROI