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NYT Traffic Doubles, Revenue Grows Since Killing Subscriptions
March 04, 2008
John wrote a few times last fall about the NY Times tearing down its paid subscription wall and allowing spiders in.
Now, in an interview at The Deal, Google's David Eun (on p. 5) confirms that it was a good idea:
We have some partners that have made very bold steps, such as The New York Times, which went from a pay model to a free model. After they went free, the traffic they got from us alone doubled. Their math says they make more money by offering content free to consumers, but stimulating demand and making it work with advertising. The Financial Times did the same thing, and at least early on in the process they experienced at least a 100% growth in traffic.
Don't hold your breath waiting for further breakdown of the math, especially for the NYT example. Note that while Eun says traffic doubled, he was less specific about the money, saying only that "they make more" under the current scenario.
It should be no surprise that it's Google -- not the Times -- telling us the good news about expanded indexation. After all, Google has more to gain from all of us knowing about it, because it now gets a slice of the pie:
Thanks to BeetTV via SearchCap.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 4, 2008 10:51 AM
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