The End of Paid Content

The New York Times this week shuttered its TimesSelect, a subscription service that allowed users who ponied up about 50 bucks a year to access Times op-ed columnists and the newspaper’s voluminous archives. And it’s almost certain that The Wall Street Journalwill soon follow suit and allow its content to be available to anyone with access to the Internet.

The Times, in announcing its move, said that in the two years since it introduced TimesSelect, the online world has changed dramatically, enough that the paper feels that giving up $11 million in revenue per year from the subscription service is worth it to see how much advertising revenue can be generated through increased visits to the website as people use search engines to find trustworthy sources of news and information.

New Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch is saying the same thing, hinting that the Journal, which allows open access to about one fourth of its content today, will open the floodgates on the rest, gambling that the increase in site traffic will generate more advertising dollars than subscription.

I can still remember reading in the early 1990s that it would soon be possible to access newspapers and articles on the Internet. When it began happening, I was surprised that online content, for the most part, was free. And though pundits said that ultimately newspapers would begin charging for content, it seemed ridiculous that people would actually begin paying for content they were getting free.

And so it has happened. When it was owned by Microsoft, Slate magazine, an online-only news/politics/culture outlet, tried to charge for its content; a year later, its content was once again free. Salon magazine, another political and cultural online publication, has been able to survive through a subscription model, but it has opened up much of its content for those willing to watch advertising.

Since it went behind the firewall, Salon has become less influential simply because its writers and content are not part of the online conversation that is taking place across the Internet, around the world. TimesSelect writers, many of them, like Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, David Brooks and Frank Rich, influential pundits on both sides of the political spectrum, had become less and less a part of the conversation.

So as we welcome back those writers and others from behind the subscription firewall, let’s think about what this will mean for those of us who consume the news online. As they transition to online productions, expect newspapers to find different ways to serve up advertising. But don’t expect that online publications will charge for content. That dog won’t be hunting any more.