The business case for TimesSelect
Last month, the New York Times discontinued TimesSelect, the program that required readers to pay a subscription fee to read popular columnists and access the paper's archives. The news was greeted with whoops and hollers from the members of the web's hallelujah chorus …
Context & Ripple Effects
The New York Times pulled the plug on TimesSelect in mid-September, and the announcement landed as a capitulation to the web's 'hallelujah chorus,' which had spent two years arguing that walling off columnists and archives was self-defeating. Nick Carr's Rough Type piece is the contrarian accounting exercise: he asks what the program actually earned versus what freeing the content might earn in ads and reach.
The surrounding coverage frames both sides of that ledger. Traffic analysts at Compete measured the audience surge once op-eds went free, while Read/WriteWeb argued the paywall was only half the problem — the deeper issue was that closed columnists generated no links, no search presence, no conversation. Meanwhile a MediaShift roundup found readers still willing to pay for niche content, suggesting the lesson is selective, not universal.
First-order effects
- The Times' star columnists — previously reachable only by subscribers — are now open to every reader, blogger, and search engine, converting a fixed subscription line into advertising inventory and inbound links.
- Subscribers who paid for TimesSelect lose their exclusive access immediately, and the Times must make up the forgone revenue from page views on op-ed and archive pages.
Second-order effects
- Other papers running or considering columnist paywalls face a forced comparison: if the Times' traffic and ad numbers validate the free model, their own walls look like a competitive handicap rather than a revenue stream.
- Archive content becomes a distribution asset — as kottke.org's excavation of old Times gems showed, unlocked archives feed the link economy that paywalled back-catalogs were locked out of.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, general-interest news converges on an ad-supported free model at scale, with paid subscriptions reserved for genuinely niche or premium products — the split the MediaShift roundup anticipated.
- The episode becomes the reference case for newspaper pay-for-content strategy: the question shifts from whether to charge readers to which slice of content justifies charging, and what closing it costs in reach.
The trend: Major newspapers are abandoning blanket reader-pay models for ad-supported scale, reserving subscriptions for niche content where willingness to pay survives.