There has long been friction between the traditional old media providers which include print and television, and new media information sources which are overwhelmingly Internet based.
If you look deep enough you can find some basic philosophical differences between the ways old media and new media approach information flow. Old media has traditionally provided information to folks who were willing to buy access to it. That access might be in the form of a magazine or newspaper subscription. Or that access might be purchased via a cable television package where some of that subscription money is passed on to the TV network supplying the cable company with content.
On the internet typically access to new media information is generally more freely available. It is closer to a radio model where the information is broadcast and the business supplying the information makes its money via advertising.
Where it gets interesting (and frustrating for some of us) is when old media providers apply traditional models to their forays into the new media realm.
One example is the New York Times. Roughly two years ago they launched their Times Select online service with much fanfare.
For a little under $8 a month or $50 a year you could get access to current op-eds and syndicated columns, and do special things like explore the NYT archives back to 1851 (but you could only access 100 articles a month or some such). 
Articles that were part of that service were annotated with a special orange ‘T’. I guess that was to make to make the readers feel special.
Well today this headline caught my eye:
New York Times to end paid Internet service
It seems even the venerable New York Times has finally figured out that hiding their content behind a subscription barrier is costing them money.
By allowing anyone access to their content they will are sure to get significantly more page views. Web traffic equals eyes on the page. And anytime you can produce a bunch of eyes looking in one place, advertisers are eager to pay a premium to put their add in that spot.
And that, my friends is a recipe for a sound revenue model.
Content X Traffic = Advertising Revenue Potential
Not only that, but the New York Times has determined that that model will be more profitable than hiding their content behind a subscription barrier. Kudos to the NYT!
Commodity content gets commodity pricing, so the price of news goes to zero. Great for the consumer. Unless, of course, our unwillingness to pay for content makes it impossible for the unique, high-quality, low-volume, long-form publishers to make a living, in which case we all lose.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the New York Times, which holds itself up as a bastion of editorial integrity and quality journalism, helped kill both?
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Brijit, Good point that there may still be a market for the highest quality niche content via subscription. People are willing to pay for content they can’t get anywhere else.
But then the author has to actively market their content in addition to the effort required to produce it. And that marketing eats into the profit margin.
So should I feel stupid that I had a Times Select subscription?
I have to say that I don’t understand Brijit’s initial comment about commodity pricing. The cost of a subscription was always just high enough to demonstrate the audience’s investment to advertisers, right?
Mark, I think what Brijit was getting at is that so much news and opinion is available anywhere these days for free that it has effectively become a commodity.
The NYT discovered that they were leaving money on the table by making their content hard to access because it cut their search engine referrals way down. The traffic from Google, Yahoo, etc. was bouncing right off the subscription barrier rather than viewing pages in that portion of their site.