They must be dumber than I thought…

Who?

The Grey Lady. That’s right, the venerable New York Times is who I’m talking about.

Why?

Well I just read that they are seriously considering to begin charging for online access of one form or another. Remember the days of Times Select, when they charged for the Op-Eds? According to the Huffington Post, this sort of thing may return because as you all may have heard, the Times is struggling. Reports say they are borrowing money right now at 14% interest. Read it folks. 14%!!!!! That’s like what adjustable rate mortgages come out to on the other end of the teaser rate.

Here’s more from Huffington Post:

“TimesSelect generated something like $10 million a year, which was real money, but in the end the company calculated that we’d be better off taking down the wall and letting the flood of additional visitors to the Web site attract advertising dollars,” Keller said. “The lesson of that experiment, however, was not that readers won’t pay for content.”

Errrrrr, we’ll see how successful that’ll be. I’m betting against it. Anytime, there is some kind of subscription fee, the site loses “stickiness,” that is, the eye-time that surfers spend on the site. That’s because I think we have come to a point to be highly suspicious of subscription especially for the Times, which had previously quit charging people for online access. If they were going to continue with TimesSelect, they should’ve never taken it away. I think at this point, they are going to have a tough time reinstating it, while maintaining the same kind of traffic and “stickiness.” We’ll see what happens. I like the Times and the Sulzbergers are Fieldston fam-o but I think this is a bad move. I’m willing to be proven wrong though…