Late last year Nick Carr wrote a piece titled The business case for TimesSelect
which discusses the recent change for the archives of the New York Times away from a subscription model toward an advertising model. Carr’s point is that the Times didn’t necessarily error when they made the choice of a subscription based web presence over a more open business model. His point and the resulting comments are interesting, however it made me think of how much I hate the business model
of the Star Tribune here in the Twin Cities.
The policy of the Times subscription model was to make the archives available for a fee. After an article has aged some amount, it was archived
behind the subscription policy. In the case of the Star Tribune, once an article ages past some point it is removed permanently from the site never to be seen again. Considering the concept of the long tail it seems this policy is the worst of both worlds; not only is the information not available to generate subscription revenue but it also is removed from the long tail benefit of potential advertising revenue. The Tribune, a publication struggling for revenue, seems to have done themselves a disservice.
As a side effect, I can no longer link to Star Tribune articles from this blog. Any link to a Star Tribune article is a broken link waiting to happen; their policy breaks MY site as well. From a traffic standpoint, this blog doesn’t make a substantive difference to their bottom line; however, the concept of the long tail suggests that a significant number of small blogs linking to a variety of articles over time would provide a non-trivial advertising income. As Carr likes to point out, the Star Tribune could share crop
the profits from the work of others for the trivial cost of storage.
Putting aside the question of the public benefit associated with archives being available in some form, the business plan they have chosen to implement make me wonder if they have anything to say which is worth keeping around at all.
Tags: Digital Share Cropping, New York Times, Nick Carr, Star Tribune
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