Tom Grubisich: February 2009 archive
The New York Times needs an online impresario to help it pay its bills
February 11, 2009
The New York Times should indeed use its website to generate more revenue – but not by charging for any part of its presently all-free daily report. Executive Editor Bill Keller's recent ruminations on the touchy subject of paid content have led to speculation that the dearly departed Times Select will be reincarnated in some more palatable form. Times Select required users to start paying for the paper's columnists and some other stories. It threw in as a sweetener the paper's archives going back to the 19th century. But most of the millions of nytimes.com users decided they wouldn't pay for content they'd been getting for free.A confidential memo from multimedia publishing pioneer Steve Brill obtained by Romenesko argues that the Times should "[flip] the Web's lethal dynamics" and start charging for online content. Under Brill's elaborate pricing scheme – you have to read his whole, alternately maddening and inspired memo – nytimes.com visitors would pay $55 a year to get access to all content. Search engines and aggregation sites would continue to get free access to the headline and first paragraph of each story – to help keep nytimes.com relevant as an information source on the Internet. Brill, who unsuccessfully tried to sell paid content with his Brill's Content during the dot.com boom/bust, acknowledges in his memo "all of this may seem unrealistic," but nonetheless concludes, "There is no alternative."
Times Select was a bust, as was Brill's Content. But there's another way for the Times to exploit the potential of its website to raise needed revenue that advertising by itself can't bring. More...
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