Reuters reports that the New York Times is taking its TimesSelect service free. This comes as no suprise because it was reported several weeks ago that it might happen. There will be no more monthly or annual fees from TimesSelect starting on Wednesday. The Times is also making its archives free dating back to 1987. The New York Times' motivation behind freeing up these sections and archives is simply to increase traffic so they can sell more ads.
"Of course, everything on the Web is free, so it's understandable why they would want to do that," said Alan Mutter a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and proprietor of a blog about the Internet and the news business called Reflections of a Newsosaur.
"The more page views you have, the more you can sell," he said. "In the immediate moment it's a perfectly good idea."
The longer-term problem for publishers like the Times is that they must find ways to present content online rather than just transferring stories and pictures from the newspaper.
Most U.S. news Web sites offer their contents for free, supporting themselves by selling advertising. One exception is The Wall Street Journal which runs a subscription-based Web site.
TimesSelect generated about $10 million in revenue a year. Schiller declined to project how much higher the online growth rate would be without charging visitors.
The Times will have a $10 million annual revenue drop from ending TimesSelect to contend with but they should be able to make it up if they receive a big enough traffic boost from the freed content. Reuters said that Times said in a statement that they are expecting a "substantially increased number of unique users referred to and accessing the site."
Paid Content reports that TimesSelect closed with "787,400 active subscribers: approximately 471,200 home delivery subscribers, 227,000 online-only paid subs, and 89,200 free academic subscriptions." Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says that TimesSelect "represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media." That is likely true. How far away can a free Wall Street Journal and Financial Times be? Here is the story about TimesSelect's termination from the Times itself. The newspaper also published a letter to readers about the end of TimesSelect.
Reuters 
