What Does The New York Times Decision To Fold TimesSelect Say About The Death of Paid Content?

Excerpt: "The New York Times has reportedly decided to abandon TimesSelect, its experiment with paid content on the web. This comes as no surprise since the pay wall was controversial, both internally and externally, from the beginning, but it's even less surprising when you look the at the fundamental economics of content in the digital media age that may soon put the final nail in the coffin of paid content.

The ability to charge for content in non-digital media like newspapers, magazines, and cable TV was based on a limited supply of content and monopoly control of distribution. The web and digital media have generated an overabundance of content — not just a spike in high-quality content but, more disruptively, and even larger spike in "pretty good" or "good enough" content. The web has of course utterly destroyed destroyed distribution monopolies. Anyone can create and distribute content on a meaningful scale.