"According to traffic measurement firm Compete, the opinion section of the Times websites has seen traffic more than double since the move, and overall traffic to the newspaper’s site is up by 10 per cent."

"Looking at [NYTimes.com] traffic (as per comScore) tells us that the Times probably realized the $10 million $20 million TimesSelect was generating was not enough to makeup for the missing page views and ad dollars a completely free site could generate."

Vin Crosbie: TimesSelect "yielded some $10mi from 227,000 paying customers. That’s less than 2% of the site’s more than 13m registered users. Its revenues are less than 5% of the site’s revenues from advertising on freely accessible webpages.

"[At the next downturn] all the execs who have been staking their careers on the promise of online advertising will stare at their dwindling quarterly returns and wonder why they hadn’t banked some subscription revenue as a hedge against a downturn."

Scott Karp: "Newspapers — and all original content producers — need to think about the ‘lifetime value’ of their content when monetized through fees vs. when monetized through advertising."

Mark Potts: "the delight about the end of TimesSelect is misplaced. While the "content needs to be free" crowd hails it as a victory, the fact is that TimesSelect was the right idea, badly executed."

Jeff Jarvis: "TimesSelect represented the last gasp of the circulation mentality of news media, the belief that surely consumers would continue to pay for content even as the internet commodified news"

The New York Times paywall is coming down on Wednesday. Paying TimesSelect subscribers will receive a prorated refund.

"It had been rumored for weeks, but became official tonight with the posting on an article on The New York Times online site: The paper is ending its practice of walling off part of its offerings in a pay channel, TimesSelect."

"Citing anonymous sources, the New York Post has reported that rival Manhattan paper The New York Times is planning to do away with TimesSelect, the subscription-only content on its NYTimes.com Web site."