TimesSelect

» see select.nytimes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

in 2005 i was twenty-one, in the middle of engineering school, reading english-language news mostly through aggregator sites and the occasional direct link a friend on msn pasted. the new york times opinion page was not something i had a daily habit around. timesselect was the moment the times decided its columnists were worth a subscription on top of the print product and put them behind a $49.95-a-year wall. from where i sat, the experiment registered mostly as a story about whether the english-language press could charge for opinion. it could not, at least not yet.

the launch was september 19 2005. the package locked frank rich, maureen dowd, paul krugman, thomas friedman and the rest of the op-ed page behind a paywall, along with 100 archive articles a month going back to 1851 and early access to sunday sections. home-delivery print subscribers got it free. everyone else paid $7.95 a month or $49.95 a year. the times had 750,000 print subscribers who got it bundled and was hoping the digital-only tier would add hundreds of thousands more.

by august 2007 the digital-only count was 227,000, a real number on paper. the problem was upstream. the columnists hated being out of the link economy. paul krugman and maureen dowd both lost something in the order of 70 to 80 percent of their referral traffic compared to the pre-wall window. blog quote rates fell off. the columnists were no longer part of the conversation the way they had been when their pieces were free links anyone could send to anyone. on september 17 2007 the times announced timesselect would close two days later. it died on its own anniversary.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it was sold ~

the internal pitch was simple. print subscriptions were aging. classified ads had gone to craigslist. the web was free and ad-supported, which paid less per reader than print and was nowhere near closing the gap. timesselect was supposed to prove that a brand strong enough to charge for print could charge for digital opinion. the package was bundled so print subscribers paid nothing more, which protected the print number while the digital number was supposed to grow on its own.

the columnists were never sold on it. several of them spoke publicly during the run about feeling cut off. krugman wrote later that being behind the wall made it harder to influence the debate he was supposed to be part of. the editorial pressure built quietly across two years.

~ the math that killed it ~

the kill decision was a bet on advertising. by 2007 the times' web traffic could be sold to advertisers at scale, especially if the opinion columnists came back into the link economy and brought their share of the inbound. vivian schiller, who ran nytimes.com at the time, said the open web would deliver more revenue than the 227,000 subscriptions were producing. the math, in the moment, looked right. search and link traffic was the larger lever.

the kill also closed a chapter without fully ending the question. the times put up the metered paywall in march 2011, a much smaller and friendlier version that let casual readers in for free and only charged the heavy ones. that one worked. it became the model the rest of the english-language press tried to copy for the next decade.

~ what it left behind ~

timesselect is the first big publisher experiment in modern digital subscriptions that everyone in the industry watched and learned from. the lesson it taught was specific. you cannot wall off the part of your product that has to live in the public conversation if you want it to keep being part of that conversation. the 2011 metered model came directly out of the timesselect kill report. the rest of the paywall era, the financial times paywall, the wsj wall, the slow growth of the times' subscription business into the millions, all of it has timesselect's two-year run as the prior step that proved a different shape was needed.

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