Through a bunch snazzy looking graphs, Zubin Jelveh at Portfolio speculates that the Times lost money on TimesSelect. That's so funny, because we were just speculating that Conde Nast is losing money on Portfolio.

We never cared for TimesSelect, but now that it’s gone we do miss our email previews of the Sunday paper. Because of this technicality, we have to discontinue our Tomorrow’s Most Emailed List Today feature. Besides, with the columnists back, the list has become just a bunch of white guys ranting about the Bush administration anyway.

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.

We’ve always said that the chance to have sex or watch other people have sex are the only things will pay for online. Brooke Gladstone, host of On The Media, couldn’t agree more.

Interviewing the Vivian Schiller, senior vice president of nytimes.com, Gladstone asked,

Did it occur to you that there are just certain things that people won't want to pay for? I mean, people will pay for porn but they won't pay for Thomas Friedman.

Schiller’s reply is the standard TimesSelect-was-a-success-even-though-it-wasn’t-profitable answer.

Maybe if Tom Friedman hit the gym a bit more the Times wouldn’t be in this mess. Strike that, columnist porn would not have been successful either.

The New York Times officially alerts TimesSelect subscribers to inform them that the elitist and wholly unnecessary service they were coaxed into overpaying for has officially been terminated, effective immediately, and the subscription fees fully refunded automatically reallocated to the even less utilitarian Google Reader.

The full letter, after the jump.

CONTINUED »

After two years of charging us $7.95 per month to read about Maureen Dowd's personal life, the New York Times has finally seen the error of its ways and agreed to cancel the odious TimesSelect service. And despite pulling the plug, the always obstinate NYT still refuses to acknowledge that the short-lived TimesSelect experiment was a profit-draining, money hemorrhaging failure.

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.

“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

Which is to say that they didn't actually lose money so much as they made exponentially less than they would have made in online ad sales had they not made a HUGE FUCKING MISCALCULATION and started charging for their content.

"The New York Times is poised to stop charging readers for online access to its Op-Ed columnists and other content," reports the New York Post. "After much internal debate, Times executives - including publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. - made the decision to end the subscription-only TimesSelect service but have yet to make an official announcement."

Which is great news for the general public, less great for the NYT, and even worse for the 221,000 or so of us who foolishly bought into the Times' elitist crap and shelled out $49.95 a year for the privilege of reading about MoDo's personal life, or lack thereof.

The only thing that doesn't suck?

The unnecessarily tall picture of a half-smiling Arthur Sulzbeger, Jr., presumably selected by intrepid Post reporter, Holly M. Sanders, and creatively captioned: "Sulzberger. Internal angst."

And here the Times thought we had to pay to see great journalism.

All we want to say to New York Times TimesSelect advertising is "Shut Up."

Oh, and "You forgot 'JFK Blown Away.'" But mostly just "Shut Up."

Take a Trip Down Memory Lane (a toll road) With TimesSelect [Copyranter]

We are floored by Clyde Haberman's admission this morning.

Anything but "Hindu," please — we just don't think we can go back there. Those memories (that just about everyone growing up anywhere at any time has) of saying that word for the first time … it's just too much.

This Column, by the Way, Is a 2nd Draft [Clyde Haberman, New York Times]

New York City. It is a place filled with mystery. How do you take the JMZ train? Where did the Garment District go? What's the difference between 5th Ave. and the mall in Cleveland? Why can't you read New York Times articles online without shelling out the big bucks?

And today, the New York Times wants to answer another great mystery. How hard can it be to fix a broken escalator? (We assume the one in Union Square is mentioned in the article we can't read without purchasing.)

Oh those hidden New York puzzles. Will we ever be able to understand? This and other urban riddles are obviously best pondered while typing your credit card number into the TimesSelect's online subscription form.

Urban Riddles, Best Pondered in a Long Line [New York Times]