The “Free model” for on-Line publishing is dead

The growth of paid online services under the Financial Times banner shows that the paper was right to maintain pay walls at a time when other media companies were yielding to the Silicon Valley mantra that “information wants to be free,”

Now The Financial Times is adding to its paid-content strategy with a plan to accept micropayments for individual articles, as an alternative to a subscription.

And one by one, other publishers are starting to see wisdom in the paper’s ways. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of the News Corporation, said this month that the company intended to charge for all its news Web sites. That plan would have the company’s major newspapers in the United States, Britain and Australia joining their sister newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, which already charges for access to most of its site.

Executives of The New York Times have said they are considering ways to get readers to pay for online access, though they have yet to disclose specific plans.

That is a big change from 2007, when The Times site abandoned a pay wall for some content, concluding that it was restricting the potential for online advertising, despite the site’s having attracted 227,000 paying customers. NYT

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