2010: The Year The Paywall Comes Down

Apparently, the newspaper industry has finally had enough – or at least the New York Times has. Word came out on Wednesday that the New York Times would start charging for its online content.

The Times has tweaked its model from all-everything or all-free with a model that will only charge its most avid users. But that’s significant, given the fact that the media as a whole tends to follow the lead of the Times in how business is done.

For the past few years, the newspaper business has tried to stop its collective bleeding. Blaming everyone from unpaid bloggers to Google, much of the consternation stemmed from regret over not charging for access from the early days of the Web.

With the Times moving ahead and pulling the trigger, look for many other newspapers to follow suit. The media has argued that it wants to benefit financially from the giant traffic stream that Google brings to its sites, but that argument may be flawed.

While it’s true that readers are going to search engines as their first place for news, they might not be biting on the hook that newspaper web sites are offering. According to a new study, 44 percent of people who scan headlines on Google don’t click through to newspaper Web sites.

When the paywall slams down around the Web there’s going to be a much tighter atmosphere for the information that fuels aggregating sites and search engines. If The Huffington Post can’t excerpt the Times as often, how does that impact the value of HuffPost?

The year of the paywall will cause ripples across the Web and force users to answer the question of whether they are willing to pay for information just like they pay for apps and music.