Why NYTimes.com content is now free

Posted on | September 18, 2007 |

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There has been a great deal of speculation from the announcement that NYTimes.com is now offering their content for free, dropping their $49 per year subscription service. Some say it’s in anticipation of Murdoch’s newly acquired WSJ dropping their own subscription model for an ad supported one. Could be. Others in our world claim that Search was the driving force behind it. I am in this corner.

A couple of years ago, NYTimes.com did a massive overhaul of their site structure to improve its SEO. Once the structure was sorted out, we started seeing a few more references from the NYTimes.com (the 1% that wasn’t locked away) appearing in results.

Then word that content creators were altering their headlines to accommodate search engine spiders raised our interests even more. Ultimately though, the majority of the site remained invisible to search engines, plus very few people were actually linking to the website - bloggers love citing (linking to) references but if it requires a subscription and they could probably get information on it elsewhere, NYT would be excluded from the list thus hurting their SEO efforts (links from other websites are deemed very valuable for search engine rankings).

By dropping their subscriptions in lieu of ads could significantly increase their visibility and traffic from search engines like Google. Being on a CPM model, this equals dollars. Whether or not it will be enough to cover the $10 million they were making through subscriptions is another story. Personally, I don’t think it will be a problem.

Just another example of the power of search engines in this brave new world.