The New York Times Pay Wall

The New York Times has erected another pay wall for its online content. In the new iteration, users will be permitted free access to 20 articles (from any section of the site) in a month before they will be required to pay. In the early years of its website, the Time content was free. In 2005, they instituted TimesSelect, a system that put some of their content behind a pay wall. In the earlier instance, some sections of the site were always free while others (primarily columnists and op-ed pieces) were behind the pay wall. Two years later, the Times dropped TimesSelect and made the site free again.

Newspapers are still experiencing a catastrophic loss of revenue. Regular (hard copy) readers are dropping, subscriptions are plummeting and classified ad revenue has almost dried up. On the latter point, The Business insider recently published a chart which shows that classified revenue has dropped 92% since 2000. And, as with all other forms of online content, hard dollars are not being replaced by digital cents.