What Free Times Select Means for Digital Editions

The NY Times is tearing down their paid gateway, allowing readers to view Times Select content for free.  What does this mean for digital editions?

1.) There are many great options besides having paid content. Scared to lose paid subscription revenue? How about opening up a certain number of pages, or opening up your content for certain dates — or, heck, opening up certain pages on certain dates. It’s all easy to do within a Nxtbook.

2.) If you’re thinking of doing a digital edition, here’s the point you really really (my eleven year-old would add three more "reallys" here) need to consider:

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

This is huge. The reason The Times is doing this is simply because people were finding their content from search engines and other third party sites. There is sooo much digital edition content out there today that is not indexed by search engines and can’t be shared via third parties. Ask the vendor you’re considering if this is the case with them. Ask for proof, ala Google results and del.icio.us links. If you don’t choose a product that’s indexed by search engines or full of page-specific permalinks, you’re pretty much guaranteeing that you won’t be releasing the kind of news the Times just did.