Placing a long-term bet on online advertising and the power of search engines, the New York Times will, effective tomorrow, close down its two-year-old “Select” subscription service (which was actually making money for the paper) and opened up access to columnists, Select blogs, and archives from 1987 to the present, and 1851 to 1922. Nice!
From PaidContent, quoting the Times’ own coverage:
The change is because of what’s happened in the internet in the past two years – ?particularly the power of search.” She [Vivian Schiller, senior vp and general manager of nytimes.com] added later: “Think about this recipe – ?millions and millions of new documents, all seo’d [search engine optimized], double-digit advertising growth.” The Times expects “the scale and the power of the revenue that would come from that over time” to replace the subscriptions revenue and then some.
Yep, and Elsevier is doing it, too, in a somewhat more manipulative way. Rather than holding tight to their subscription dollars, they’ve created http://www.OncologySTAT.com, to give doctors (especially those not connected to a medical center with a research library) free access to the contents of some 400 journals. They’ll sell advertising on the site, and docs have to register to get their access, so Elsevier can also, according to the Times, sell their list of registrants to the advertisers.