This week two of the major subscription-based news sites on the Web have advanced plans to abandon their subscription-plus-advertising revenue models in favor of advertising-only models, which would make all their content available free online. First, the New York Times announced on September 18 plans to make the formerly subscriber-only parts of its site available for free, effective September 19th. The Times had charged for access to portions of its site for two years.

Then, later on the 19th, the Wall Street Journal’s likely new owner Rubert Murdoch announced that he was leaning towards making the WSJ’s online content (almost all of which is now only available to subscribers) available free of charge.

Both Murdoch’s announcement and the NYT announcement express the belief that the growth in ad revenue due to increased readership will more than offset the lost subscription revenue, with the NYT noting that this is particularly likely given the large number of people who find NYT articles through Internet searches, rather than by starting at the NYT home page.

These announcements follow in the wake of similar decisions to stop charging for online content made by the Los Angeles Times in 2005 and Slate in the late 90s. If Murdoch follows through with his floated plan for the WSJ, it will leave the Financial Times as the only major newspaper to charge for online access to its content. While FT denies having plans to follow suit, the announcement regarding the WSJ raises the specter that increased competition from other online news providers and the user preference for free over subscription content has created a potential for increased advertising revenue that could surpass the lost subscription revenue even in the market for business and financial information. Many had thought this market was insulated from such trends due to the quantifiable monetary value that up-to-the-second financial information has to investors.

Will this trend ultimately extend to even financial sites with more of an analytic focus than a news orientation, such as Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers.com, or will the value of such information to investors continue to support a subscription model? And could Lexis and Westlaw be next, with the increased availability of legal materials from non-subscription sites? It could be that the reliability and comprehensiveness of such search sites, along with the ability of financial and law firms to pass those costs on to clients, will forestall such developments. Still, I think we are headed in the direction of the free model. What do you think?