As expected, the New York Times appears to be seeing a substantial traffic jump now that its columnists and other opinion/editorial content are outside the newspaper’s “pay wall,” which was recently dismantled in favour of the Wild West known as the Interweb. According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent.
As Valleywag notes, those extra pageviews are going to help the site’s bottom line, although they are likely still not enough to make up for the lost revenue from the death of TimesSelect. The important thing is that the newspaper’s columnists and other content are now part of the gigantic link-farm known as the Internet — and the growth in readership that they are likely to attract over time will almost certainly make up for the loss of the TimesSelect gravy train.