The NY Times stopped charging for access to select sections of the website a couple of weeks ago.

… The move comes two years to the day after The Times began the subscription program, TimesSelect, which has charged $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives. TimesSelect has been free to print subscribers to The Times and to some students and educators.

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our 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.

…

The Times’s site has about 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, far more than any other newspaper site. Ms. Schiller would not say how much increased Web traffic the paper expects by eliminating the charges, or how much additional ad revenue the move was expected to generate.

read the entire article: Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site – New York Times

Many took this to signal the end of “paid walled gardens” on the internet.

The advertising supported model has won out. For now.

In the end, I think consumers will want the option to have free content, advertising supported, as well as the option to get the same content at cost, without advertising.

The next big step is to improve advertising on-line. It’s pretty annoying right now.

The NY Times, by the way, has the most attractive format of any paper I can recall.

Not the cluttered home page, but internal pages like this:

Still, I’d much rather go to Google News or Digg than the NY Times. (Google has no conspicuous advertising, Digg has one.)