Get with the Times: Kill the Online Subscription Model

As of midnight tonight, access to much of the New York Times online content, previously limited to TimesSelect users (who paid $7.95 monthly or $49.95 annually), will be free for all. The resultant increased traffic should position the Times to generate ad revenue far exceeding lost subscription dollars.

Vivian Schiller, senior VP and general manager of NYTimes.com, attributes the change to a shift in how people find news online. She notes that "readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs, and other online sources." It's nice to see the Times embracing Web 2.0 instead of viewing it as a threat -- especially in light of a 2007 study that reveals "the rapid growth of online advertising is expected to see the sector overtake US newspaper advertising in terms of size by 2011."

Even for sources of journalism, in the online world, if you want to monetize your site, its becoming sell out or get out. As Scott Karp from Publishing 2.0 wrote:

The ability to charge for content in non-digital media like newspapers, magazines, and cable TV was based on a limited supply of content and monopoly control of distribution. The web and digital media have generated an overabundance of content -- not just a spike in high-quality content but, more disruptively, and even larger spike in "pretty good" or "good enough" content. The web has of course utterly destroyed distribution monopolies. Anyone can create and distribute content on a meaningful scale...

The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free -- even if the free content isn't "as good as" the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn't matter because there's so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.