Some publishers want to use “free” to draw traffic. Free linking over the web remains a big item in content circles as more major media companies come to value unpaid traffic. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) named a “free content” editor to extend efforts to feed free news links to bloggers, and the new paid archive-and-more plan from the New York Times (NYT), called TimesSelect, may include an affiliate revenue plan to induce bloggers to keep driving traffic to NYT op-ed columnists. Meanwhile, the New York Post continues to suffer fallout from their botched registration implementation and they weren’t even trying to get people to pay; the Drudge Report has dropped standing links to a few Post columnist.
NYT Digital head Martin Niesenholtz recently revealed how important RSS has become to the company’s online efforts. He expects RSS feeds to drive ever-more traffic to nytimes.com. “Links from My Yahoo! feeds have grown from half a million to seven million pageviews. It’s the fastest-growing distribution channel that we have,” he said.
We babble on about RSS regularly with little movement from publishers, but when it’s free, easy, and the NYT says it’s their fastest-growing distribution channel, isn’t it time to give it some more thought?