New York Times mulls charging for website access

In a survey targeting existing subscribers, the media company said it was "considering charging a monthly fee of five dollars to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia".

The survey then asks: "How likely would you be to pay a US$2.50 monthly fee - which would be a 50% discount for home delivery subscribers - for continued, unlimited access to nytimes.com?"

At present, users can access all content on the nytimes.com website for free, but the company has experimented with access charges before.

In 2005, it launched Times Select, which charged a fee for access to some opinion and editorial content, but it shut the program down two years later.

The proposal described by the survey that was sent to subscribers yesterday, Thursday 9 July 2009, suggested a much broader attempt to increase revenue for the media company, amid falling profits across the industry.

Company spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said that a monthly access fee was only one possibility being considered.

"We are doing research on a variety of scenarios," Mathis told AFP.

The survey on Thursday seemed designed to gauge the effect of additional charges on The New York Times' existing print subscription base, asking subscribers to respond to a series of assertions about possible fees.

Respondents were asked to click on a range of options from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" in response to statements including: "I would gladly pay for access to nytimes.com in order to support the Times' quality journalism" and "I think it is wrong for The New York Times to charge anyone for access to nytimes.com."

Source: AFP

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