Thaindian News

NEW YORK CITY (BNO NEWS) — The New York Times on Wednesday announced plans to introduce a paid model for its website in early 2011, less than three years after terminating an earlier online-subscription service.

The company, which calls it the ‘metered model’, said users will be able to access a number of articles per month for free. Once they exceed this number, the user will be charged. “This will enable NYTimes.com to create a second revenue stream and preserve its robust advertising business,” the company said in a statement. It also said it will provide the necessary flexibility to keep an appropriate ratio between free and paid content and stay connected to a search-driven web.

The issue of paid news content emerged late last year when NewsCorp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch announced his intention to charge visitors to his websites. “Quality journalism is not cheap,” said Murdoch in August 2009, who also complained that visitors from websites such as Google News are not valuable. “The digital revolution has opened many new and inexpensive distribution channels but it has not made content free. We intend to charge for all our news websites,” he said.

But the question remains if the new subscription model will work for the New York Times this time, less than three years after it was forced to abandon a similar model. In 2007, the newspaper scrapped its online-subscription service called “Times Select”, which generated around $10 million in revenue annually. The problem then, an executive editor said, was that the service limited the number of readers available to advertisers. However, websites such as the Wall Street Journal already have a successful paid-subscription model.

The New York Times said it will build a new online infrastructure for its website through 2010, designed to provide consumers with a frictionless experience across multiple platforms. The company said that subscribers to its print edition will continue to have free access to its website.

“Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’s extraordinary, professional journalism,” said Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of The New York Times. “Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

“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,” said Janet L. Robinson, president and CEO of The New York Times Company. “We were also guided by the fact that our news and information are being featured in an increasingly broad range of end-user devices and services, and our pricing plans and policies must reflect this vision.”

According to Alexa.com, which provides basic information about the number of visitors to websites, NYTimes.com is among the world’s most popular websites. Alexa estimated the website to be the world’s 97th most popular website, while it is the 26th most visited website in the United States.