NYTimes Traffic Increases After Pay-Per-View Dropped

Posted on | March 1, 2008 | View Comments

Two years ago, I was invited to a conference at NYU (it was hosted by Andy Plessr, who was my ex-boss Jason Pontin’s PR guy, and whose name appears at the bottom of this post). The topics were spread across the new media spectrum. One panel in particular involved the NYTimes folks (and it may have been with Vivian Schiller, I can’t remember).

The woman representing the Times was adamant that the Times Select pay-and-registration model was going to change the way the news industry handled its business online. Revenues would soar. People would pay to access this premium content with big names from around the world.

The only problem: the users didn’t come.

Maybe other folks were surprised. It wasn’t shocking to me (which I expressed at the conference). The Read/Write Web doesn’t need a gatekeeper anymore. Hiding your content — believing you are the source of all things important — is a recipe for disaster.

How do we know? The Times has seen a massive increase in traffic since it went “free.”

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