A requiem for TimesSelect

While some may gloat about the apparent demise of the fee-based TimesSelect service, I see no reason to celebrate the service’s inability to bring in enough subscribers to justify its continued use of a subscription business model.

The simple fact is that there really is (almost) no such thing as free content. Someone is always paying, whether it’s the subscriber handing over a credit card number, the advertiser looking to catch eyeballs, or a combination of the two. And there’s really nothing wrong with that. It costs money to create content, and even the smallest of publishers need to find ways to cover their costs. Sure, there are cases (like yours truly) where the information is essentially free (yeah, I’ve got some PPC ads on here, but I haven’t even earned a buck on them), but personal blogs (and Wikipedia) aside, most info on the web is paid content. Of the top 100 blogs on Technorati, for example, only a handful are ad-free (the leader is PostSecret, which, fittingly, bills itself as “the largest advertisement-free Blog on the web”).

While TimesSelect may not have worked out as a pay service, it doesn’t mean information “wants to be free” or that the Times is going to stop trying to make money online. It just means the numbers for a free, ad-supported site were more favorable than those for a subscriber-based version. For others (like my employer), a subscriber-based model works very well. Either way, somebody is paying, and if that ever stops, information won’t be free; it just won’t be.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 7:19 pm