NYT: Goodbye TimesSelect

Two years ago, when I said that the New York Times subscription model wasn't going to work, I thought it might last a year.

Turns out, it lasted two. Apparently the 227,000 subscribers (like Deirdre and I) who paid for full access to the NYT online brought in $10 million a year in revenue. Now the NYT is discontinuing its subscription model, although it said TimesSelect met projected expectations.

Apparently the number crunchers have figured out that opening up the NYT to the 13 million unique users who visit monthly will get them more ad revenue than the TimesSelect model, even after splitting the profits with Google and Yahoo.