New York Times to Stop Charging on its Website
This is good news to hear: the New York Times has announced that it will stop charging readers for all services on its site beginning tonight at midnight.
The decision came about as their management began to realize that ad revenue from web traffic on a free site would be more significant than the value gained from its online subscribers.
Their TimesSelect feature, which provides extra access to the paper’s archive and its columnists, was previously available for $49.95 a year or $7.95 a month. Like most non-subscribers, I was turned off by the fact that I could not access certain articles unless I paid almost $5 for it. Beginning tomorrow, the paper’s archive from 1851 to the present will be available to everyone at no additional cost.
When I was in high school, I convinced the librarian to set aside the school copy of the New York Times for me everyday. St. Mary’s gave out free copies of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Tribune but I always found the Times’ expansive coverage to be more entertaining to read.
But with the beginning of summer break came the end of my access to the school library. I found myself relying solely on the Times’ website for my daily fix on their content. According to Nielsen ratings, the Times generates over 13 million unique visitors per day, making it the most popular media-news source on the web.
The print version of the New York Times is available at newsstands for $1, which is at least twice the cost of any major Bay Area newspaper on weekdays. Like I told Inman News when they profiled me last week, most of the news is available online already, and it’s free. The word ‘free’ is a big, attractive deal — especially for teenagers like myself.
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Damn Joe. You’re one intellectual guy. You think deeper than a lot of the guys I know.
Thanks for the heads-up, Joe.