Web Sites Tear Down That Wall

As of October 1, online users of the Financial Times were able to read as many as five articles every 30 days without registering, and 30 without subscribing.

"FT.com wants to encourage new users access to the site without having to register or subscribe, reflecting the fact that many people first enter FT.com (and other Web sites) through links from aggregators such as Google or references from other articles," Pearson spokesman Charles Goldsmith wrote in an e-mail from London. Also, visitors to FT.com will get a "first click free" if they arrive at the site from Google or other aggregators, even if they have exceeded their monthly limit of free stories.

All online content providers face the Google factor.

For example, viewership of the home page of washingtonpost.com accounts for 20 percent less of the site's overall traffic than it did two years ago, editor James Brady said. Increasingly, users arrive at the site "sideways," from other sites, he said.

Web publishers say these users are less valuable because they tend to come to read one article and then leave, rather than exploring the site and being exposed to more advertising. About half of the users of the New York Times' Web site enter through the main page; the rest come in sideways, said Vivian Schiller, the site's general manager.

In 2005, the New York Times launched TimesSelect, a subscription service that put its columnists and archives behind a pay wall. When Web users searched for and found a New York Times column they wanted to read, they bumped up against the pay wall. Many users found it discouraging; Times columnists largely vanished from the Web conversation.

The Times in September abandoned TimesSelect, which had about 471,000 users who subscribed to the print version of the Times and 227,000 TimesSelect-only subscribers who paid the annual $49.95 fee. Over the course of TimesSelect's life, the service made about $20 million. But the Times Co. saw greater growth potential in taking down the wall.

"At the time we decided to launch TimesSelect it was the right decision because the power of search was not yet apparent," Schiller said. "I don't think anybody regrets it. Well, maybe some of the columnists."

But one former Times.com employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the employee's new company may do business with the Times Co., said TimesSelect was opposed by the Times newsroom and Web operation, which believed it would cripple Web access to Times columnists. The former employee estimated that charging for columns for two years cost the company "tens of millions of dollars" in advertising revenue. Schiller said the company did an analysis of TimesSelect's performance before deciding to make it free, but she did not give a number for any lost revenue.

Weisberg noted that Slate tried the subscription model for about a year, beginning in 1997, but raising the wall lowered the spirits of Slate writers, Weisberg said.

"That meant the theoretical ceiling on people who would read anything you wrote was 20,000," he said. "The whole point of the Web was that if something you wrote caught on, it would be read by hundreds of thousands of people in a few hours. It was a drag for writers."

Slate dropped the wall and switched to an ad-supported model. This will be its first full year of profitability.