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.

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?

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.

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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