So the New York Times has announced that it will be charging for content on their website, a last ditch effort to make some money perhaps. The NYT does do pretty much all of its reporting, so you can see why they might be wanting to try this effort out. I for one, think it`s going to flop like just about every other attempt like this attempted. What is different however, is that the NYTimes.com website been seeing a lot of growth in the past 5 months, and hopefully this doesn`t hurt that effort. With a lot more popular content going away from the Google Index, I wonder if they`ll still manage to keep organic traffic up.
I think this is a great opportunity from a marketing and SEO perspective because we can monitor any changes, without footing the bill of course. I`m also wondering about how much organic and social media traffic they`ll lose to those big stories. I`ve seen other paid newspapers have there paid content landing pages rank well in Google, and that pissed me off quite a bit, so hopefully we don`t see that here.
What are your thoughts?