Pay for content? Good night and good luck.

Last week The Times of London (really just called The Times) moved to a premium/pay for content model – you can read about it here.  I love stories like this because seeing if people will pay for what is considered ‘premium’ content is something that I’m sure ALL content providers would like to know.  The problem that I would want to see overcome is the immense drop in traffic that a site experiences when this model is adopted – and you see in that story that online readership dropped over 90% – yikes.  They are committed to keep on with this strategy and absorb the drop in traffic to their content in an effort to realize revenue from it.  In my experience, asking users to pay for content is a very tricky proposition because you really come to rely on the eyeballs that you bring to your site in order to establish a strong web presence and compete with other sites that are providing like content.  Such a huge drop in visitors would be devastating to the sites that we help promote – but we aren’t in the news business. The New York Times has also made plans to move to a pay for model as well in January of 2011 – read here.  It looks like there is potential for this to move to other news sites (where I guess there is safety in numbers), but with the ability to have information proliferate across the web – especially news – to sites that will not charge to read, that this could end up being detrimental over the long run for a short-term profit.  I don’t know the news business (full disclosure – shocking, right?), but it seems like getting as many eyes to your site as a news producer and then determining ways to generate revenue from these visitors (ad sales?) would be an option…