New York Times Building

Can paid content keep the Times afloat? Photo by Dominik via Flickr

Well, it appears that the NY Times has decided that it is finally time to provide some of its content online for a fee. This isn’t a new idea. In fact, they did it from 2005-2007.

They were even successful in doing it, bringing in about $10 million in revenue annually from it. Eventually, they discontinued the practice because many articles were inaccessible to people that found the articles through search engines, costing them page views. So, since the NYT believed that there was so much potential growth in online advertising and much less in subscription revenues, they discontinued the subscriptions in order to grow their traffic and maximize their online advertising revenue. (more…)