• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 18, 2007

As expected, The New York Times ended its premium TimesSelect service and is once again offering all of its content, including columns by well-known authors like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, for free.

In an article about the shift, the Times reported that 227,000 people paid for service to the tune of around $10 million a year, but said online ads could generate even more revenue if the site was free again. "[O]ur projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising," said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com, in the Times article.

Not only did the company shutter TimesSelect, but it's now offering more free content than two years ago, when it started charging for some columnists. As of today, archived articles dating back to 1987 are available for free -- meaning that researchers no longer have to either sign up for the service or pay charges per article.

While the move shows the Times Co.'s optimism about online advertising, it also demonstrates, again, that consumers are reluctant to pay for editorial content online. With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, major newspapers haven't been able to gain traction selling paid Web subscriptions.

And even at the Journal, new owner Rupert Murdoch has indicated he will stop charging online access fees. Just this morning, at an interview at the Communacopia conference, he said that freeing the WSJ.com site would boost traffic enough to compensate for any lost revenue.