One of the oddities in the NY Times introducing its recent emperor's new paywall is the fact that the NYT already played this game and failed a few years ago. Back in 2006, over a year before the NYT finally realized this was a dumb idea, we had pointed out that it appeared its subscriber numbers had totally plateaued, foreshadowing the end of the paywall. I was reminded of that after some were saying that the NYT's recent announcement of 100,000 subscribers to its (still discounted) paywall shows that it's on a path to success.

With that in mind, it's fascinating to see Joshua Benton, over at the Nieman Lab, compare the results of the TimesSelect paywall with this new paywall, and suggest that the initial results aren't really that impressive in that they track the results from last time. After scouring reports to find out how many people signed up for TimesSelect, he put together this chart that shows the clear plateau: So it looks like the last time around, they quickly jumped out to about 100,000 subscribers... and then things slowed down and they had to slog it out for new subscribers. This time around the paywall situation is definitely different. This paywall covers the entire NY Times, but is much more leaky. So you have one force pushing more people to subscribe... and another that diminishes the reasons to subscribe. But the key point remains. The success (or failure) is going to be determined by how many people the paper can convince to keep signing up... and I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the NY Times is going to find it hard to grow this part of their business in any significant way over time.

As was rumored last month, the NY Times has decided to pull the plug on its TimesSelect paywall service, making all NY Times content from 1987 forward free online (they're also making all of the content from 1851 to 1922 free, but that's already in the public domain). This move comes two years after the paywall was first put in place. At the time, we were one of many who pointed out that this was going to make the NY Times a lot less valuable, and it seems that the business folks at the NY Times finally did the math and came to the same conclusion. They note that subscription growth was slowing (something that was obvious over a year ago) as advertising growth was ramping -- and that they hadn't counted on how many people would be drop-in visitors, coming from other sites. That seems like an odd statement, since it was quite obvious more than two years ago that search engines and other sites tended to drive a tremendous amount of traffic to news sites. Either way, like others before it, the NY Times should be congratulated on doing the right thing, while questioned for what took it so long (or even what made the company make the mistake in the first place).

The New York Times' plan to lock up its premium content known as TimesSelect was a terrible idea to begin with, and every piece of data that came out about it merely confirmed that the program was unpopular. Sure, the company drew a modest amount of revenue from it, but in exchange it severely limited the exposure of its top columnists, not to mention all of the foregone advertising revenue from the lower traffic. Now comes word that the paper is set to pull the plug on the offering (via Romenesko). At this point, it's still just a rumor, but either way, the company has to arrive at this conclusion eventually. Newspaper publishers cling to the dream that one day all of their content will be safely behind paywalls and that readers will suddenly wake up with an allergy to money and favor this model. But the trend is only moving one direction, as there's even talk about the Wall Street Journal, the one paper that's had a moderate amount of success charging for access, making its content free.