The New York Times has anounced that it is to drop TimesSelect, the subscription service it set-up which charged users to view certain parts of its website. Launched in 2005, it is reported that TimesSelect brought in around $10 million in revenues, but that it is expected that this didn’t match the predictions for revenue if the whole site were free to view:

our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager…of NYTimes.com

So what could have caused one of the biggest names in online publishing to drop a revenue model that was bringing in millions of dollars, when many other publishers would kill for just a fraction of that money in these times of declining print revenues? Well, in a word, SEO.

Yep; the New York Times has moved to a free access system because it saw just how much extra traffic it could get by concentrating on search engine optimisation, and figured that it could then generate much more revenue by showing advertising to this extra traffic. Now this may not seem like rocket science, but it is a major development nonetheless. Why? I’ll tell you.

A lot of publishers

1. still rely on some sort of subscription model.
2. can’t seem to properly monetise the traffic they do have.
3. don’t trust the search engines.

But here’s the New York Times saying that it’s going to do without the first of those, reckons it has the second cracked, and couldn’t do without the third. And that, is definitely news that’s fit to print.

UPDATE: It looks more & more likely that Rupert Murdoch will be following the same path with the Wall Street Journal, and dropping its subscription fees.

If you’d like to talk to use about how we can help you with your search engine optimisation, why not give us a call?

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