The Jeff Beckham Weblog

Much has been written already about the New York Times’ decision to end their TimesSelect subscription service. Check out some of the best here:

• Jeff Jarvis
• Staci Kramer
• Rex Hammock
• Dan Gillmor

As those folks point out, there’s more there than just freeing the Times columnists from behind a paywall. The Times is also opening up their archives for the past 20 years.

Why?

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

Exactly - soon the Times’ stories will move to the top of the search results for news topics. The traffic (and advertising revenue) generated by those search results will surpass the money brought in by circulation and subscriptions during the TimesSelect era.

Other publications would be wise to follow suit.