Lessons from the Success of Times Select

One year after the release of its subscription-based service, Times Select, the New York Times Co. reported continued strong results for its online strategies. As print advertising revenues continued to fall (4.2% year over year for the group as a whole)) online revenues, with the help of higher ad rates at About.com, rose by 27%. Times Select subscriptions were at 513,000 by the end of June, and generated over $6 million in revenue in its first 12 months. By comparison, Dow Jones reported 768,000 paid subscribers for the nearly 10-year old WSJ.com. For the top news brands, at least, the strategy of integrating some paid subscription content into the overall marketing mix seems to be working. Smaller news and industry trade publishers are following the numbers closely to see what might be learned and applied to their own content. Here are a few obvious take-aways:

1. Leverage your print subscriber base. Subscribers to the print NYT received free access to Times Select, and this group makes up about 2/3 of all Times select subscribers.
2. Combine free ad-supported content with subscriber-only content. There was a speculation when Times select was introduced that pulling any content behind a subscriber “wall” would alienate the world of web users, but this has not been the case.
3. Know what content your users are willing to pay for. It seems simple, but being able to segment content between what should be free and what should be paid is something the traditional premium aggregators have never been able to do. It costs the same per article, for instance, to buy a PR Newswire article from Factiva as a Wall Street Journal Article.
4. Make sure that Google indexes your premium pages. This is a no-brainer today, since anyone (not just the New York Times) can submit content to Google for indexing, even if that users who click on the links are required to pay for the content. NYT.com was one the first services to take advantage of this.
5. Get the pricing right. Of the online-only users, about 20,000 initial subscribers signed up at the pre-launch annual rate of $39.95, and the remaining 140,000 (not counting about 10,000 academic users who received additional discounts) felt it was worth up to $49.95 per year to have access to Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks.

So, to all publishers who are looking for ways to make up for those dwindling print ad revenues and declining royalties from the traditional aggregators, it’s time to develop new ways to monetize the online market. Services like indeXet are making this easier than ever.