More evidence that free is better
The data points continue to pile up in favour of the decision by the New York Times to drop its subscription service: according to a post over at TechCrunch, traffic to the NYT website has climbed by more than 60 per cent since the wall was removed at the beginning of September. ComScore’s latest survey apparently shows that the Times got 19.4 million visitors in October, compared with about 12 million in August — for an increase of 7.5 million or 64 per cent. There are issues with comScore, as there are with most of the major measurement firms, but when combined with the New York Times traffic numbers that I recently mentioned from Nielsen, it’s obvious where the overall trend is going.
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(On Dec 10th, 2007 at 7:06 pm)
More visitors is not necessarily an indicator of success. Certain people (mostly anti-business types) will trumpet this as a success, with little justification.
The bottom line is what matters. If you can not monetize the page views then you have a failed business model.
Quality content is worth paying for. Anyone can give away content, and most do.
If the NYT uses the page views to sell ad space or other NYT products then that is fine. However to date, most papers have shown how truly clueless they are about business.