By: Joe Strupp Nearly 200,000 people have signed up and paid a special fee to use The New York Times' TimesSelect service since it launched one year ago, the newspaper revealed Wednesday. The service allows access to all of the newspaper's Op-Ed columnists, archives, and other features that are unavailable to non-subscribers.
Since it launched on Sept. 19, 2005, the paid service has drawn 198,690 users who do not subscribe to the print paper, but pay a special online fee for access. That is up from 156,000 in January and 183,000 in June, suggesting growth may be leveling off. The access fee is $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year.
Since January, the Times reports the service has brought in about $6 million in additional revenue.
Those online-only paid users account for roughly 37% of the total TimesSelect audience, which includes another 338,310 users, or 63%, who receive free access to the TimesSelect service as part of their print subscription, but who must also register.
That means a total of 537,000 people have registered to use the service in the first year, a number the paper considers successful. "It is exceeding our expectation," said Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty. "It has been a steady growth since the beginning."
For the first few months, the TimesSelect registration was pretty evenly split between print subscribers and those signing on just for the Web access. But since last spring, the Web-only subscribers have diminished as a percentage.
Since TimesSelect began, the paper has added other features behind its so-called "paid wall." Those include numerous blogs, podcasts, and video offerings. This week, in honor of the paper's 155th anniversary, the online archives have also been greatly expanded, McNulty said.
Instead of dating back to 1981, as they have for the past several years, the online archives now go back to 1851, the year the newspaper began. "They have been working on it for at least the past year," McNulty said about the arduous archiving process. "It was a major project."
McNulty said some staffers have had access to the expanded archives for several days and are using them for both work and amusement. "A lot of people are having fun with it, typing in their family names to see what comes up," she said. "One person here put in the address of their building and found out Joe Dimaggio and Marilyn Monroe once lived there."
A review of some of the nation's most historic moments via the archives also gives some educational perspective. Reporting Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, the Times' non-bylined story for March 5, 1861 began, "The day to which all have looked with so much anxiety and interest has come and passed. Abraham Lincoln has been inaugurated, and 'all's well'."
During its first year, TimesSelect has had its share of controversy. Some of the Op-Ed columnists have admitted that they were less-than-thrilled with having limits placed on their Web availability. A number of readers, meanwhile, complained that they cannot e-mail the columnists as easily since a special TimesSelect e-mail process has been instituted and their e-mail addresses are not published along with the syndicated columns in other newspapers. In addition, some of the columns have been pirated and placed on other Web sites without permission.
Despite those bumps, McNulty said no major difficulties have arisen. "We have not had a problem with any of those," she said. McNulty also predicted continued growth and expansion of the program, but said no plans are in place to expand the paid-only aspect to the rest of the online paper. "We are not discussing that right now," she said.
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For a look at how the Times covered Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" in 1863:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003154524
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