NYT says goodbye to subscription-only content
Effective September 19, 2007, TimesSelect has ended. Content previously published for TimesSelect is available free to all NYTimes.com visitors
You still need to register to read a lot of the NYT site, though. Lots of sites do this, to keep an eye on who’s reading their articles so that they can better market you to advertisers. Of course, if you’re using Firefox — as you should be — you can just use the BugMeNot add-on to get around even that.
I don’t know if I buy that information wants to be free, but Internet users sure want it that way. Making Internet content commercially viable is going to require a change in the advertising model (TV advertising falling apart will end up helping here, in the end), not creating ways to irritate would-be readers.
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Yeah, I used to read Nicholas Kristoff pretty regularly, and at least scan the topics of the others (except for Maureen Dowd), but I certainly wasn’t willing to pay for other peoples’ opinions.
Comment by Jeff Hamilton — September 20, 2007 @ 21:40