According to Jon Friedman, TimesSelect wasn't nearly as huge of a money hemorraging disaster as everyone seems to think it was!

[A]fter news of its demise made the rounds, bloggers proclaimed that TimesSelect had bombed and that the mighty Times miscalculated from the start, ultimately swallowing its pride by putting TimesSelect out of its misery. To be fair, I suspect that a lot of them have simply always hated the Times and were trying to make the paper look bad.

Another theory: A lot of them always really liked the Times but, having ample experience in the field of online advertising, immediately understood that the meager profits they were earning from TimesSelect memberships would have been exponentially offset by the money they could have brought in online advertising by boosting their page-views and overall web readership.

Another theory: A lot of them have simply always hated Jon Friedman.