The New York Times will make you pay.
The Times announced yesterday that it will end its free-for-all online service and start charging to read complete articles. Print subscribers will have full access to the Web site, but others will have to pay a monthly fee to read more than a certain number of stories.
The switch won’t happen until 2011.
Times Publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. said the company needs a year to work on its infrastructure to ensure a “frictionless experience across multiple platforms.”
The Times Co., which has suffered dramatic ad losses, hopes to open up a new revenue stream with the model. But it doesn’t expect the new fees to overtake ad revenue on the Web, according to a joint memo Sulzberger and company President Janet Robinson sent to staff.
“While digital advertising will continue to be the major contributor to our success on the Web, we expect that online subscription revenue will improve our ability to grow an important part of this business,” they said.
According to Nielsen Online, nytimes.com gets about 17 million unique visitors a month. The print edition has a weekday circulation of 928,000.
In 2005, the Times launched Times Select, which put star columnists behind a pay wall. When the project was abandoned two years ago, it had more than 200,000 paying customers.
Sulzberger and Robinson acknowledged in their memo that there is still division on the merits of the strategy.
“As you have already seen over the past few days, there are those who think that such an action is critical to our future success and those who see it as a serious mistake.”
A few papers have succeeded in charging for online content — including The Wall Street Journal, which has more than 1 million online subscribers. (News Corp. owns the Journal and The Post.)
In November, Newsday became one of the largest US dailies to charge for online access, at $5 a week for non-subscribers who want more than basic service. As expected, it took a traffic hit.
Times shares fell 39 cents, or 2.9 percent, to $13.31 yesterday.