New York Times Free Access Is Slashed Further

The number of articles that people will be able to access online from the New York Times is being slashed in half, from 20 a month to just 10. This comes after the publication has been very pleased at the number of premium digital subscribers it has been able to amass over the last year, when it first started treating online content like a subscription service similar akin to the paper version.

And in that short span of time, the publication has earned nearly 500,000 premium digital subscribers. In a press release announcing the change, NYT CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr said, "Today, close to a half million people are now paying for digital content ... We knew that readers placed a high value on our journalism, and we anticipated they would respond positively to our digital subscription packages. Our commitment to all of our subscribers, both print and digital, is that we will continue to invest in and evolve our journalism and our products."

Despite its better-than-industry-average growth in the world of premium news content, the New York Times is still struggling. Its profit fell 26% in the most recent quarter, because the advancements in digital just haven't been enough to account for the company's print business, which has been floundering for years. New York Times ad sales in the digital sector actually grew 11.1%, while print ads fell 7.1%. But those proportional numbers don't tell the whole story, which is thata 7.1% drop in ad revenue when you're talking about millions of dollars is a pretty big deal.

[via VentureBeat]