You may have heard that the New York Times is eliminating its paid service, NYTimes Select, and is making all of its news, including its archives, available to the public.
Good news for tirekickers, Scrooge McDucks’, and penny-pinchers all around — but, there was actually one kernel of information in this whole bit of news that many seem to miss.
And that is the *reason* why the NYTimes.com is making all that great stuff free. Sure, they’re “losing” all that tasty online subscriber revenue; but as Jeff Jarvis astutely points out (or, perhaps, remembers from a Powerpoint presentation done a long time ago), the NYTimes may not be actually making *profits* after all costs are taken into account.
No, the real reason why they’re making it free is because after going through the numbers, *more* people are coming in through Google, through *organic search*, than through type-in traffic, or traffic within the New York Times.
Woah.
I think this is a big admission, because the New York Times is confirming what everyone has suspected all along — that the economics of being “free” made more sense to the bottom line.
And more importantly, that Google — through organic search, its indexing and now being able to link *to* all of that deliciously good stuff so that readers could actually find it in the way that they *want* to find things (through Google and not through NYTimes) — had a big role in this.
You know back in August, Sam Zell, billionaire businessman who bought the Tribune properties, kicked up a giant storm by introducing the idea that Google was “stealing” business through its Google News property. Furthermore, he brought up the idea of having Google *pay* traditional news media to be able to index its property.
At the time I wasn’t the only one who thought this was bass-ackwards, and now this move by the New York Times proves it.
Google provides a valuable service that drives traffic *to* newspapers, and its in newspapers — or any online media — best interests to have all of its information indexed and findable so that it can get as much traffic as it can, so long as advertising is a chief format of said media.
Google pay traditional media for indexing? The New York Times suggests, if *anything*, it should be the other way around.
More:
- Scott Karp discusses the importance of the Lifetime Value of google search
- Eric Berlin queries if the Wall Street Journal is next
- Mat Ingram thinks that opening up the NYTimes will allow more *inbound* links (which is good)
September 18th, 2007 at 12:33 pm | Permalink
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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September 15th, 2008 at 11:12 pm | Permalink
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