The New York Times Co. will attempt to monetize additional sections of its content online with the introduction on Sept. 19 of a new subscription service called TimesSelect.
Subscribers will pay $49.95 a year for exclusive online access to most of the Times' columnists in the Op-Ed, business, New York/region and sports sections as well as see video interviews and Web-only posts. Except the archives, these areas currently are free to readers visiting www.nytimes.com.
“All of our news, features, editorials and analysis will remain free to readers of NYTimes.com, as will our interactive graphics, multimedia and popular video minutes,” said NYTimes.com editor in chief Leonard M. Apcar in a note posted on the site.
Home delivery subscribers of the Times' print newspaper will have free access to TimesSelect, a cross-channel move to sustain circulation of the publisher's bread-and-butter product.
“This week, you can sign up early to get uninterrupted access to the columns when TimesSelect launches,” Apcar said.
Times columnists include well known media personalities like Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, John Tierney, Bob Herbert, Nicholas D. Kristof and Frank Rich.
To further sweeten the deal, the Times will open conditionally its archives of articles going back 25 years to TimesSelect subscribers. The goal eventually is to offer access to articles dating back to the paper's birth in 1851. Subscribers will be able to read up to 100 archived articles a month.
Also, subscribers can save and organize articles in a personal Times file, use the News Tracker e-mail alert service and gain early delivery of content for the Sunday newspaper via the Times Preview facility.
NYTimes.com is one of the most visited news sites nationwide. An estimated 11.26 million unique users visited the site in May, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. New York Times Digital estimates worldwide unique users in May at 15.54 million.
The mean age of the NYTimes reader is 45 years, as per Nielsen//NetRatings @Plan data for the summer. Fifty-three percent of the readers are male. Mean income is $84,243 and 74 percent of the audience are college grads or post-grads.
Company data also show that NYTimes.com is not just a local news site.
Eighty percent of its U.S. readers are outside the New York DMA. Eighty-three percent of the monthly readers are in the United States. Fifty-five percent of NYTimes.com readers access the site at home, 42 percent at work and 3 percent in other media, according to a RoperASW survey of users. Thirty-three of users claim to use the site more than 20 days a month.
Mickey Alam Khan covers Internet marketing campaigns and e-commerce, agency news as well as circulation for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
