Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Boycott Worked?

I've boycotted the NY Times online subscription services. When I first began to blog, the dialog with the NY Times pundits was continuous. MoDo, Krugman, Bobo Brooks were all quite relevant to the discussion. Then they went behind the pay wall .....

It was predicted that the move would simply make them all irrelevant. And that's exactly what happened. Now it looks like they've rethought that strategy:

The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content, The Post has learned.

After much internal debate, Times executives — including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. — made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement, according to a source briefed on the matter.
I would guess they found that they 1) the buzz from their writers went away, 2) they didn't get many subscribers, and 3) that the "hits" on the Times website plummeted resulting in lost ad revenue. It was predicted to be an unwise move and I guess it was so.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Howard Dean said it: "You have the power". He was right.