Death of Circulation

NY Times just stop their online subscription model (US$49.95 per year) for accessing their content online on 17 Sep. The entire sites is now open to all readers.

• NY Time said the subscription had met expectations with 227K subscribers and generating with US$10M a year, but the growth projection of subscribers were low, compared with the growth of online advertising. In the long run, advertising revenue will dominate over subscriber revenue model.

• More readers come to NYTimes.com through search engine (rather than directly on NYTimes.com) and they're not likely to be subscribers. Advertising is the best way (rather than subscription model) to monetarize the traffic.

Other similar online newspaper example (Los Angeles Times also stop their subscription model and go for advertising model)