As of midnight tonight, the Gray Lady will do away with TimesSelect, the annoying "pay wall" behind which, for the last two years, the paper's website has been hiding its most popular columnists, as well as some of its special features and its archives of stories dating back to 1983. Online readers will once again be able to access the writings of influential establishment mouthpieces like David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman without paying anything.
It seems the Times finally got the fact that 99.9% of information on the Internet is free, and that they were losing massive amounts of potential ad revenue by not allowing non-subscribers, directed to the Times' website through search engines like Google and Yahoo, to view this content. Less hits = less $$$. Whatever they were making from TimesSelect subscribers ($49.50 per subscription per year), simply didn't make up for this loss. By erecting a cash barrier around the aforementioned opinion leaders, the Times shot itself in the foot, essentially removing these same columnists and their opinions from the national conversation and, in effect, marginalizing them. It was a calculated yet uninspired move that seemed destined to fail from the beginning. You can read all about it here.
Apparently, one of the few large newspapers that still has a "pay wall" model in place is the Wall Street Journal, although brand-new WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch is already making noises about doing away with that and going back to an advertising model.
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3 comments:
This is interesting. The newspaper business is definitely hurting as Internet access grows. What I wonder is how much of this NYT's move is due to loss of ad revenue, and how much is due to the mainstream media loss of it's traditional propaganda monopoly through Television and Newspaper?
There will be a big push for Mainstream media propaganda to take over the internet. We see this already with Google censoring for Chinese audience, Yahoo banning Joe Vialls, Myspace censoring Ron Paul 08 bulletins, and of course the Internet II initiative, the plan for release 2 of the internet, where the one person one vote democracy of the current internet can be subsumed to the one dollar one vote principal - the wealthier you are the faster and louder your message will be.
As a NYT home subscriber I got access to the ramblings of the Times op-ed contributors for free so this was never really an issue for me. Nevertheless, I always thought it a strange business decision to keep content from internet users while at the same time fighting the demise of print journalism because of the rise of the internet. I'm interested in hearing more about the internet 2.0. Commodifying speech is nothing new-politics is all about the guy with the most money gets the message across the loudest. Say, how far are you guys from Vallejo? I'm going to be up in that neck of the woods on 10/3/07 for a mediation.
Mark, I think we are only about 20-25 minutes from Vallejo. Let's plan on getting together for dinner.
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