Pay or Free?: Newspaper Archives Not Ready for Open Web...Yet

"While bloggers such as Cory Doctorow and Jay Rosen added more calls for open archives, the keepers of the keys to newspaper archives were less enthralled with the notion. Those pay-per-view archives bring in a steady source of income for large newspaper sites, shielding them from the cyclical nature of online advertising. They also help preserve huge revenues from database services such as LexisNexis.

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Nisenholtz admits that paid archives on NYTimes.com only brings in a percentage in "the low single digits" of overall online revenues, and Borrell Associates estimates that paid archives account for less than 5 percent of online revenues for newspaper sites.

But the sale of archives to LexisNexis, Factiva, ProQuest and others is a "significantly higher number" for NYTimes.com, according to Nisenholtz. While there's no stipulation in its database contracts for NYTD to keep archives behind a wall, Nisenholtz realizes that making archives free online would erode their value in other places."