"Ungated" New York Times Brings Record Visits in October, Vivian Schiller tells Beet.TV

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The Nielsen numbers for online traffic at newspapers, which came out yesterday, show a significant jump in unique visitors to the NYTimes.com for October.

In reaching 17.5 million uniques, the paper had its best month ever, a Times spokeswoman told me.  The numbers are up from 14.6 million in September.

Earlier this afternoon I interviewed Vivian Schiller, Senior VP and General Manager of the NYTimes.com  She attributes a significant part of the increase to the end of the subscription model called Times Select.  Fueling the growth, she also cites popular multimedia features, blogs and a successful search maximization strategy.

Way ahead as destination for newspapers, Schiller says the paper is heading to compete with news portals and cable television sites. 

Meanwhile at the Wall Street Journal

With numbers like this, we can see why Rupert Murdoch will make the Wall Street Journal subscription free.  To find out more about what might be happening in the takeover of Dow Jones, read this story just published in The Economist, titled "Brace Yourselves."  The venerable news magazine reports:

Mr Murdoch reckons that the Journal could dominate the market for financial information online. A free wsj.com, he thinks, could attract 10m-15m regular readers from around the world...

-- Andy Plesser

Update  11/19:  On Friday, The New York Times Company released a revenue report for October and said that online revenue in the News Media Group by 19 percent.