new york times - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

The New York Times' decision to drop its outdated subscription model appears to have paid off, with visitor numbers increasing by almost 3m in October.

Figures from Nielsen/NetRatings, quoted in WebProNews, show that the newspaper's online audience grew from 14.6m in September to 17.5m last month.

The New York Times has been making changes to its UGC policy recently -enabling users to make comments directly on its blog pages but stopping short of allowing them on all articles.

Until the end of last year, it had no system for user participation, but has since started to add links to news sharing sites Newsvine and Digg so that comments could at least be left on these sites.

The New York Times announced on Monday that it will allow its stories to be commented upon, yet it stops short of embracing user-generated content by allowing comments only through third party sites (Digg, Facebook and Newsvine).

It is the first time the newspaper's online site has added a news-sharing tool, which will allow users to discuss its stories on social news sites, though in truth users can do this anyway...

Nevertheless, the paper has embedded links to all three sites onto many of its online stories.