Faced with the need to increase its online advertising revenue, the New York Times stopped charging for access to parts of its website.

For two years, the paper has offered a subscription program, TimesSelect, that allowed access to columns and archives. (Access was free for print subscribers.) Only 227,000 felt the NYT was so irreplaceable as to be worth the $49.95 per year fee.

Times execs claim they’d always set their expectations low. Even so, they’d recently realized that the majority of visitors to their online site were arriving there from search engines only to find themselves denied access to search results. Plus — and here’s the truly surprising part — they finally figured out that people arriving via Google, for instance, weren’t going to pay to access an archived article.

Yes, folks, it’s the “DUH!” heard ’round the world.

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