What has your newspaper done to raise online revenue (comments appreciated)?

By Greg Bensinger

July 9 (Bloomberg) -- New York Times Co. said in a survey of print subscribers that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s Web site.

In the survey, Times Co. also asked whether subscribers would be willing to pay a discounted fee of $2.50 a month for Web access. The Web site, nytimes.com, is currently free. Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for New York-based Times Co., confirmed the survey in an e-mail.

The newspaper had an average of 647,695 weekday home delivery subscribers as of the 26 weeks ended March 29, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data. That doesn’t include single-copy sales or third-party sales.

Times Co. is selling assets and has cut pay and jobs to help combat the ad sales drop. First-quarter advertising revenue at the publisher plunged 27 percent, and the company said it expected a similar decline in the second quarter.

“The New York Times website, nytimes.com, is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia,” the survey stated.

In 2007, the New York Times ended a two-year experiment of charging users for some opinion and editorial content. At its peak, 200,000 users paid for the service, called Times Select, and it generated $10 million a year in revenue, Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said this year in an online question-and-answer session.

Times Co. will probably begin charging users to access its news on mobile devices before it does so on its Web sites, Martin Nisenholtz, the head of digital operations, said last month. Mobile devices accommodate less advertising than the Web, he said.

Times Co. lost 7 cents, or 1.4 percent, to $4.84 at 2:32 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares fell 33 percent this year before today.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net