New York Times will start charging readers to access for its website’s content next year in the hope that it can generate a new, reliable revenue stream to offset weakness in the advertising market.
Readers will get free access to a limited number of articles per month, although that number has not yet been determined. To read anything beyond that, the Times will charge a flat fee, which will allow unlimited access to everything on the site.
The decision concludes a year of analysis and internal deliberation at the company over how to build a viable online subscription business without muting the newspaper’s influence or hurting its Web advertising prospects. It comes amid skepticism that large numbers of consumers will pay for news online when it’s widely available free.
“This process of rethinking our business model has also been driven by our desire to achieve additional revenue diversity that will make us less susceptible to the inevitable economic cycles,” Chief Executive Janet Robinson said in a statement.
For anyone who’s been following the dwindling fortunes of the Times over the last few years, this decision shouldn’t come as a big surprise. The paper has built one of the largest and most impressive online operations in the business, yet hasn’t been able to make it work financially.
News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that have been able to maintain an online subscription business. The Financial Times, owned by Pearson PLC, has also had success with a metered model for charging online, leading some observers to conclude that financial news can generate subscription fees on the Web and general interest news can’t.
Online ad revenue has failed to make up for the print revenue declines of most traditional news organizations like newspapers and magazines.