Sez here that the New York Times is giving up on TimeSelect, their subscription section that charged people fifty bucks a year to read Maureen Dowd and a few other op-ed columnists. Also sez they had less than a quarter-million subscribers, which doesn't sound like a lot for a paper of that scope and importance. I'm wondering how many of those subscribers were libraries or companies that just ritually pay for a lot of online info services without paying a lot of attention to what they're getting for their moola.
In the case of TimeSelect, one of the things that obviously did them in was how much of their content was freely bootlegged and posted on free sites. I just did a quick search and without a lot of trouble, found Frank Rich's most recent column on twenty sites. A lot of the material behind the subscription firewall is also simply not worth paying for. I mean, it's not like there's a shortage of free stuff to read on the Internet.