The New York Times is ready to shut down Times Select, its subscription service that hosts its premier columnists behind a paid firewall, according to the New York Post. The service has signed up 221,000 subscribers and the numbers are dropping, the paper reports.
Media Post says Times columnists were grumbling, too. They felt that the lost readership didn’t make up for the relatively paltry revenue. An Alexa traffic graph indicates that nytimes.com traffic has been dropping steadily, although not dramatically, over the last year.
If the Times ends Times Select, it will be a blow to whatever hope there is for a paid Web content model for newspapers. At this point, The Wall Street Journal stands alone among daily papers, although quite a few specialized publications charge for content or require visitors to subscribe in print.
Comments
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 4:34 am and is filed under Fake News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
