The New York Times ($NYT) saved itself with subscriptions not ads

That's really great to see, and a positive for the industry as well. I've posted it before and will post it again. The only way to support quality content creation is for customers to pay for content. As long as content is advertising supported it will continue to down the path to 'fast food' content.

This holds for newspapers, buzzfeed, ESPN, reality TV vs. HBO/Netflix. And likely the web as a whole. The only way to survive off advertising content is cheap to produce, high volume content.

This means to have quality content either users pay per consumption (or use a flat fee monthly model), or other users produce it for you for cheap (ala YouTube).

The Times has been running lots of promos. Stuff like "subsribe for $1 per week". Currently it's 50% off for 1 year.

It will be interesting to see what the subscriber numbers are once (if ever) people need to pay 2x or 3x what their initial teaser rate is.