NYTimes made an announcement recently saying they are going to be following the same path as the WSJ and Financial Times, using some perversion of the freemium model. What’s interesting is that they tried this in the past and seemed to have been pretty successful, reaching about $10,500,000 in revenue per year. Granted its just a fraction of their annual revenue that’s not too shabby given how short this lasted. Why would they scrap it just to bring it back later? Why not keep it alive and tweak it till you find what works?

TimesSelect attracted about 210,000 subscribers who paid $49.95 a year but it was scrapped to take advantage of the boom in online advertising.

via New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.com.