Here's even more reason for the Wall Street Journal to drop paid subscriptions for its online version. Traffic to the New York Times' site has increased by 2.9 million between the months of September and October, reaching 17.5 million visitors last month, after incorporating subscription-based Times Select content into the folds of its free online offering.
With better advertising models in place, and traffic increasing for the New York Times' main site and decreasing for Times Select, it looks like offering up more free content was definitely the right thing to do. A bit of a spike is expected in the first month after a change of this magnitude, but I think we'll find that the traffic will continue to increase.
People love free, quality content, but it's also being reported that the New York times is attributing the addition of multimedia-sharing options, blogging, and better SEO to reasons for increased traffic as well.