New York Times Considers Charging $5 Per Month For Access To NYT.com (NYT) →
In 2007, the New York Times ended a two-year experiment of charging users for some opinion and editorial content. At its peak, 200,000 users paid for the service, called Times Select, and it generated $10 million a year in revenue.
Charging a monthly subscription is absolutely necessary. Even with the amount of traffic NYT gets, $5 CPM ain’t gonna cut it. I’m surprised it wasn’t instituted sooner. I’m not buying that a precedence of free online content should stop NYT from putting up a subscription model. A bunch of people are gonna bitch about having to pay for reading the news, but of course, those are the same people who like to bitch about free software. Putting up a partial paywall will at least help subside some of the bleeding.
