May 28, 2003

NY Times Wants Your Money

A nice thing about the NY Times (maybe the only thing since you can't trust their reporting, and their columnists are shrill, knee-jerk anti-Bushies) is their News Tracker service. Say, you want to keep up with all the Times stories on taxes. Just sign up for News Tracker (located on the side of every story) and the paper will e-mail you links to new stories as they are put up on the web. I don't make it a habit to visit the Times website daily and don't know how many times I've read and written on stories just because of News Tracker. So, for me, News Tracker got me to read more Times content (and see their advertising) than I would have without it.

Unfortunately, the free ride is over and the Times will be turning News Tracker into a subscriber service as of June 13. Will I be signing up for $19.95/year? No. Would I sign up for a lower price? Probably not. Will the Times lose out on traffic coming from me and my website? Definitely. Will the Times care? Not at all.

To follow the trend of more web content ceasing to be free there is the aptly named End of Free weblog.