Free For All in the New York Times' Op-Ed and Archives
Nearly a month after the New York Times shut down TimesSelect, the subscription-based service for premium content on NYTimes.com, traffic to areas of the site that were previously members-only is flowing fast and free.
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times confirmed in September that it would end TimesSelect, and the shutdown of the subscription service followed within days — see the original announcement that the Times would end charges on its site. Bloggers moved immediately to mine what the wall had hidden, with kottke.org surfacing gems from the newly opened archive within days of the decision.
The debate over whether the move made business sense was already live before the traffic data arrived: Read/WriteWeb argued the pay wall was only half the problem at NYTimes.com, while MediaShift's reader roundup found people willing to pay for niche content but skeptical of general-news subscriptions. Compete's new numbers — picked up by Valleywag the same day — are the first hard traffic evidence in that argument.
First-order effects
- NYTimes.com's Op-Ed and archive pages convert from a small paying membership into open web inventory overnight, so Times columnists and decades of archives now compete for links, search placement, and ad impressions on equal footing with the rest of the site.
- Compete's measurement itself becomes ammunition: with Valleywag amplifying the traffic stats, the size of the freed audience is now a public data point in the paywall debate rather than an internal Times figure.
Second-order effects
- Blog-driven discovery becomes a real distribution channel for the Times — the kottke-style archive posts show that freeing old content recruits independent sites as unpaid promoters, something a members-only archive structurally could not do.
- Rival publishers weighing subscription walls face a live counterexample: if Compete-style traffic gains hold up, the burden of proof shifts to defenders of premium general-interest content like TimesSelect to show what the subscription revenue bought that ads cannot.
Third-order effects
- The experiment feeds a split model taking shape across the newspaper industry — mass-market news and archives opened to maximize reach and advertising, with payment reserved for genuinely niche or differentiated content, exactly the division MediaShift's readers drew.
- If the traffic surge proves durable, third-party audience measurement firms gain a standing role as arbiters of paywall policy, with publishers' monetization choices increasingly judged by externally visible traffic data.
The trend: General-interest news publishers are abandoning broad subscription walls in favor of ad-supported openness, reserving payment for niche content — and letting independent traffic measurement referee the choice.