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RE: Print-zines, E-zines, size, policies, etc.

The Times subscription plan is more recent, it was instituted a bit more than a year ago and I've read that it's being closely watched by the industry. You may be thinking of the earlier, failed "Times Select" plan in which they charged for access to their opinion columns. That failed because subscription revenues were less than the loss in page-hit-driven advertising. The current plan is a very porous paywall: non-subscirbers can access IIRC up to 20 free articles a month. That way they keep their hits up for casual readers while charging regular readers. So in a sense, it's like what your photographer friend is doing -- or magazines that post some of their content on the web, or everything after a delay.

So far, the Times paywall seems to have attracted 325,000 subscribers and made up some though not all of the loss in advertising. It's also, thanks to bundling offers, increased print subscriptions, which earn the paper more in advertising revenue. So I think it can be called a success at this point, though subscription revenues haven't entirely offset the loss in advertising revenue. I just read that the LA Times is about to go to a paywall too.


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