TimesSelect, R.I.P.

There's already a fresh round of glee over the death of TimesSelect, which The New York Times announced tonight weeks after the latest round of rumors of its demise triggered the last round of "I told you so" excitement in the media blogosphere. (It's amazing how many otherwise responsible people leapt upon those rumors as fact, even though for weeks they were just speculation. Ah, the blogosphere.)

But the delight about the end of TimesSelect is misplaced. While the "content needs to be free" crowd hails it as a victory, the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed. Simply put, the Times put the wrong content behind its $49.95 pay wall. Columnists and opinion? At a time when the blogosphere is all about debating the very issues those columnists wrote about? Cutting Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd et al out of the conversation just wasn't very smart. And the syndication of those columnists made the Times' decision to restrict access even more ridiculous—the only place you couldn't get them for free was the Times site itself. Oops!

TimesSelect could have been so much more. It could have been a high-end subscription service for in-depth coverage that wasn't otherwise available, for supplemental reporting and blogs and Web-only content in specific vertical topics that would have been valuable to the Times' core audience, and worth 50 bucks a year. As it was, the Times' decision to include almost unlimited access to its archives in TimesSelect was a smart move all by itself. Surely a broader, deeper for-pay product could have been built around that core. Alas, we may never know.

I hear internal politics had as much to do with the decision to kill TimesSelect as business factors; as it was, the program was bringing in $10 million or so a year in revenue. Indeed, 227,000 people had signed up to pay $49.95 a year for this deeply flawed product. That's not too shabby, actually. The Times hopes to make up that $10 million through advertising on the unfettered content. It will be interesting to see if that's more profitable.

The Wall Street Journal continues with an online subscription product, as do Consumer Reports, ESPN.com and Zagat.com, to name three major consumer publications that nobody ever seems to count when looking at paid models. Given the Times' influence on the rest of journalism, the demise of TimesSelect will probably be discouraging to others that might try to make a business of charging online readers for premium products. But that model is still out there waiting for somebody to perfect. Someday, somebody will.

Comments

[knackeredhack]

I guess people will pay for something that is scarce. I had just started to subscribe from the UK, having ignored or resisted before. I kept getting driven to TimesSelect content by blogs like Cafe Hayek. It seemed to me if you wanted to be part of certain "conversations" there was a price to pay. Like you, I don't believe all journalism can or should be free. From my distant position it seems an admission of a lack of editorial ambition for what large collections of journalists under a single management can provide the public. But then I suspect most major newspapers are no more than the sum of their parts, and these days sometimes much less.

[Steve Boriss]

"the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed."

This might be said about anything, even such things as Communism under Stalin. The concept that there is some material that is so valuable and unique that web browsers are willing to pay for it is valid, as the WSJ is proving. The reality that the NY Times is actually a producer of such content is not. (Steve Boriss, TheFutureOfNews.com)

[Steve Boriss]

"the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed."

This might be said about anything, even such things as Communism under Stalin. The concept that there is some material that is so valuable and unique that web browsers are willing to pay for it is valid, as the WSJ is proving. The reality that the NY Times is actually a producer of such content is not. (Steve Boriss, TheFutureOfNews.com)

[Rocky]

My biggest problem with TimesSelect was that they were taking the content that was most valuable as linkbait and locking it up.

I'm very surprised that they decided to make much of the archives free.