The Times and Sunday Times today launches their pay wall for users of their online edition. News International know that they will lose a substantial amount of traffic by introducing a subscription system for their news and comment pages. The background to the decision can be found here.

I have an online subscription to the Financial Times and have also paid for the Wall Street Journal online edition in the past. But there is no way I will pay for the regular edition of the Times, there simply isn’t enough genuine value added and I suspect thousands of others will think the same. From a blogging viewpoint I will no longer link to any articles from the Times web site. There are few things more annoying for blog readers than to be redirected to a pay-wall site where an interesting story is blocked by annoying registration pages.