Sez here that The New York Times is about to go "pay," forcing those of us who want to read it to cough up some sort of fee. There's no word yet on how much that might be and exactly what you'll get for it so I don't know if I'll be paying. But I do know I won't be linking. The Times has one of the busiest websites on the 'net and reportedly makes some serious money on the advertising it sells because of that. It's because they're The New York Bloody Times and because so many other sites link to pieces there.
But even if I'm a subscriber, you all won't be…so there's no point in me linking you to a great piece on their site. I know sometimes on some webpage, I'll see a link to what looks like a piece I'd like to read and I'll click and discover the article in question is behind a subscription firewall and is therefore inaccesible to me. That's annoying. I'm not going to join any site, no matter how low the fee, to read one article. And I know readers of this site feel the same way because when I've accidentally linked to a piece behind a firewall, I hear from you.
The Times obviously knows that their traffic will drop when they start charging. Presumably, they've estimated that the revenue they'll lose from what it does to their ad rates will be more than offset by the loot they'll make from subscriptions…and maybe it will. But I'll bet they've underestimated how much traffic they'll lose.
I should also note that for a time, they tried charging for access to their opinion section and columnists. I subscribed to that for, as I recall, a year. During that time, I don't think there was a single article that I read there via my subscription that I couldn't find for free on some blog. If I wanted to read Frank Rich's column, I sometimes didn't even bother to hit the N.Y. Times site. I'd just Google "Frank Rich" and easily find five other places it had been re-posted in full. They dropped the subscription deal before it became time for me to renew. In fact, I think I even got some sort of partial, pro-rated rebate on the fee I'd paid. But the point is that if I'd had to renew, I probably wouldn't have. I absolutely believe that content providers have a right to charge if it's what they want to do, and I pay for many sites I enjoy. In this case though, I just felt kinda dumb that I paid for something that was so readily available for free.