As reported here and by my old boss Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, the New York Times has finally decided to end its two-year experiment in subscription web content, TimesSelect.

As an avid reader of the Times columnists who were behind the pay wall and an occasional user of the Times archives (plus a crossword junkie), I was one of the 272,000 or so people who was willing to pay the $50 (£25) per year for access to the likes of Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman. But even though I made the calculation that the content was worth paying for (or at least paying less for than a daily copy of the International Herald Tribune, where these columns and crosswords also run), the Times made the calculation that it was harming their business overall by limiting their distribution on popular search engines.

Jarvis writes:

TimesSelect’s brilliant cynicism was that, when forced to find something to put behind a pay wall, they came up with content that was, indeed, uniquely valuable — the columnists and archives. But this was also content for which there was no significant ad revenue at the time (advertisers buy ads in food and travel but not opinion sections; there is essentially no endemic advertising for blather). Thus they made the good college try to prove whether or not a pay news service could work without harming the ad revenue of the business. Even so, TimesSelect hurt the larger brand and its position in the marketplace, in the conversation, and in Google. It was a short-sighted strategy.

A short-sighted strategy, indeed. Mickey Kaus of Slate has been waging a crusade against TimesSelect for as long as the idea's been in the public domain. If you can read between the gloats below, he makes a point about the Times' arrogance that I find particularly salient given the business we're embarking on:

TimesSelect -- Pinch Sulzberger's attempt to put his prized columnists behind a subscription wall on the theory that they were so much better than free bloggers that people would pay for them -- is finally so doomed it's actually dead, dead, dead, as of midnight tomorrow.

But from my perspective, this decision reflects more than the dollars and cents that may have served as its basis. It's a reflection that the "communities" we refer to on the web really extend beyond the walls of any one site. The internet, itself, is the community, and the extent to which a piece of writing provokes a (reasoned) response anywhere is a pretty good measure of its worth. We may measure things in page views and unique users, but the interconnectedness of things makes it matter less, to a degree, where the response is posted. If you respond elsewhere to what I have to say, chances are that will pay a return of some sort by way of making my comments easier to find.