New York Times Can Do Without Internet Service

New York Times Can Do Without Internet Service
NEW YORK (Reuters)- The ever so famous New York Times Company said last Monday that it will end its paid TimesSelect Web Service. And the company will make the most out of its website available for free with hopes of attracting more would-be readers. This in turn has the potential to bring in higher advertising revenue.

Letting it go

On Wedensday, two years after the Times launched it, TimesSelect will shut down. It charges its subscribers $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month. Readers get to read articles by well known columnists such as Thomas Fridman and Maureen Dowd.

Vivian Schiller, the website’s vice president and general manager, announced that starting Tuesday night, the trademark orange “T’s” marking premium articles will begin to disappear.

The Times made the move to acknowledge the fact that by making website visitors par for content would most definitely not bring in as much money as compared to making the articles available for free; and as well as supporting it with advertising.

Schiller says that they now believe that by opening up all of their content and unleashing what will be millions and millions of new documents, combined with phenomenal growth, it will create a huge stream of revenue; a revenue stream that will most definitely more than surpass the subscription revenue.

For the Times and other newspaper publishers in the United States, it is crucial to figure out how to increase their online revenue; given that these people are struggling with a plunge in the sales of advertising and paying subscribers as more readers move to reading material online.

Alan Mutter is a former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a proprietor of a blog about the internet, and as well as the news business called Relflections of a Newsosaur. Mutter states that it is understandable why they would want to do what they did since everything on the World Wide Web is free.

Mutter adds that the more page views one has on his or her website, the more one can sell; and that in the immediate moment, he finds it to be a perfectly good idea.

For publishers like the Times, the longer-term problem is that they have to find ways to present the content rather than just transferring stories and pictures directly from the newspaper.

Supporting themselves by selling advertising, most websites in the United States offer their contents for free. An exception in the category has to be the Wall Street Journal which runs a website that is subscription-based.

TimesSelect

When it comes to revenue for each year, TimesSelect generated about $10 million. Schiller however, refused to project just how much higher to online growth rate would be when visitors are no longer charged.

It is said in a statement that once TimesSelect disappears, the company is expected to record a substantially increased number of unique users referred to the site and as well as accessing the website.

Schiller says that starting Wednesday, online readers will have access to the archives. The archives will be available for free back to 1987, and as well as stories even before 1923, and these are in the public domain.