NYT vs SearchEngineBlog

SEB says:

"...Look, no one is going to link to summaries that you then have to pay to read further. Learn the lesson of Google - give it away! It's the *traffic* you want. Once you have the traffic, then you can show them advertising, which in turn pays for the content."

Of the NYT's plans to provide permalinks leading to summaries of archived articles (you have to pay to access the whole thing).

This is basically saying that this should be a fairly straightforward decision: is the market size of those willing to pay for archived stuff smaller than the market size of the same stuff with loads of nasty NYT style advertising on it?

SEB thinks it's obvious that the latter holds. I don't think it's so clearcut. First, not all traffic is created equal. The vast majority of archived stuff likely isn't worth much to advertisers. Discovering which is a process which is costly in itself. Second, the WSJ has shown that payment models do work for well-targeted content. My guess is that the NYT experimenting with it's archives to get more info about which way to go.

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