The New York Times announced that they will put an end to TimeSelect, their premium access, in order to grant free access to all visitors.

From now on, New York Times’ archives from the past 20 years, and the public domain years of 1851-1922 will be accessible to all. Some content from 1923-1986 will also be available for free.

This move was motivated in a large part by the surge of traffic that the NYT website is receiving from search engines, thanks to Search Engine Optimization efforts. According to Staci Kramer from PaidContent, who interviewed Vivian Schiller, SVP and GM of NYTimes.com, the site was applying SEO techniques since their acquisition of About.com in 2005:

“The SEO dates back to NYTCo’s acquisition of About.com. Since About.com’s SEO technology and expertise was applied, NYTimes.com has experienced triple-digit growth in unique visitors. From July 2005 to July 2006, internal logs showed an 87-percent increase in unique visitors compared with 21 percent the previous year over year.”

NYTimes.com realized that it will make sense for them to index even more content and enjoy the traffic coming from organic search, so they’ve decided to open up their million archive pages.

With TimeSelect, the NYT was making $10M a year. Since the site has about $13M unique visitors per month, it will generate much more revenue with an ad-based advertisiting than it could from online subscription sales.

I guess Google AdWords sells guys have immediately called the NYT to suggest AdSense 🙂