The New York Times Web Site Gets A Little Bit Pregnant.
There’s No Such Thing? Tell That to the New York Times.

Philip M. Stone May 19, 2005

A wise man once told his daughter,” Remember, you are either pregnant or you are not pregnant. There’s no such thing as being a little bit pregnant.” Switch that analogy to the result of more than a year’s infighting at the New York Times web site – should it remain mostly free or a subscriber site – and the result announced this week is an almighty fudge – remaining free but some of the more prestigious items switching to subscription. In other words, a little bit pregnant.

The new policy has all the hallmarks of being a compromise between the two opposing camps. Indeed, Martin Nisenholtz, senior vice president of the Times’ digital operations, told a syndication meeting a day after the announcement, “There were people arguing to put the whole thing in. There were people arguing to put none of it in.”

Starting in September the Times is going to charge $49.95 for what it calls TimesSelect which gives paid-only access to the so-called op-ed writers – eight star Times writers -- plus regular columns written by 14 other staff news columnists. There are other benefits, including access to the archives which now costs $2.95 an item and earns around $1 million a year, but a subscriber to the print edition gets TimesSelect at no additional charge.

If the Times believes the world is panting every day to read what its columnists and op-ed writers have to say, and are willing to pay for the privilege, then experience learned elsewhere indicates the newspaper is likely in for a huge disappointment. If the idea is to march towards convergence between the print edition and the web site then why not just pull the columns and the op-ed pieces off the web and leave them just in the print edition? That will keep those people who really want that material still subscribing to print. If the idea is to try and earn a little extra from the prestige material being held back from the free site the likelihood is that it is not worth the trouble.

The experience from most news sites is that people will read what they can for free, and when they hit a subscription level they back away. The Times is counting on the fact the columnists it has chosen for TimesSelect write the material that is the most emailed from the site.

The Times’ decision comes at a particularly interesting time as two major news organizations that have been charging for some of their material have announced that material is now moving to free under the advertising-supported model.

The Los Angeles Times, which had tried charging $4.95 a month for its Calendar section covering entertainment in Southern California has thrown in the towel and under the redesign of its web site it has made that material free again.

CNN .com has announced that its existing subscriber online video, for which it now charges $12.99 a month, will be offered for free by June 20, although it may still try and sell a premium video package later.

In the UK the web sites for the Times and Sunday Times tried to charge €130 for an annual subscription for users located outside the UK. That was revered around a year later, and the number of unique visitors to the site then doubled.

The Times freely admits it is trying to have the best of both worlds. “We wanted to create an offer powerful enough to attract people and get them to subscribe,“ Nisenholtz said, while also recognizing that the web site currently has more daily visitors than the print edition of the newspaper and thus enjoys a very healthy advertising model.

There is some fear how long the advertising boom may last, and thus the Times says it is trying to diversify its revenue stream via a larger paid aspect. It is also looking to sell its TimesSelect to bloggers in the hope they will link to those columns, driving visitors to subscribe, and the Times will share revenue for the business referred from blog sites.

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. publisher of the Times, explained the new policy to his own newspaper this way: “The advertising growth on the Web has been just spectacular the last few years. But like any business, it’s going to mature over time, and when that happens, it will flatten and then you’ll get into normal cycles just like we do in print. And at that point you’re really going to need to have another revenue model.”

The only national newspaper to have gone the paid subscription route is the Wall Street Journal which has taken several years to build up to its 750,000 plus subscribers. It charges $39 annually for the online site if the user is a print subscriber, otherwise it is $79. The Times via its advertising model has more than twice as many unique visitors each month – some 1.7 million -- proving that for shear numbers the advertising model wins hands down.

The good to come from the Times’ decision is that it is yet another experiment in the quest to find out what really works on the web, to discover whether this really is a way to boost revenues.

For that, if nothing else, maybe it isn’t so bad after all to be a little bit pregnant.