By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: September 18, 2007
The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight tonight.
The
move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription
program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a
month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the
newspaper's archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to
The Times and to some students and educators.
The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000
paying subscribers -- out of 787,000 over all -- and generating about
$10 million a year in revenue.
''But our projections for growth
on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online
advertising,'' said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and
general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
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Sulzberger Jr.Photo: Getty Images
New York Times
Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that the
paper will begin charging for access to its website, according to
people familiar with internal deliberations. After a year of sometimes
fraught debate inside the paper, the choice for some time has been
between a Wall Street Journal-type pay wall and the metered system adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe. The Times seems to have settled on the metered system.
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