Big news in newspaper websites is that The New York Times will stop charging for most of its content, ending its subscription program tonight after two years.

The article about the change said that while they met their expectation of subscriptions and made $10M a year off them, they saw a larger opportunity of selling advertising for a much larger group of non subscribing readers.

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site NYTimes 18 Sep 2007

Here is another choice and telling quotation:

“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive…. The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.â€?
– Colby Atwood, president of Borrell Associates, a media research firm

The article points out that the Wall Street Journal is the only major newspaper in the U.S.A. to charge for access to most of its content and it has about one million subscribers gernering $65 million in revenue.

(more…)

Despite the huge volume of information available on the internet many interesting things aren’t there.

For example about ten years ago I read in the Globe and Mail’s “social studies” column about “cowagooba,” which is essentially the much less well known counterpart of cowabunga — which for younger kids like me was popularized by the teenage mutant ninja turtles.

In that article a decade ago I read that the words came from the Howdy Doody Show which was a popular children’s show featuring cowboy character marionette puppets with human characters too. The show ran from 1947 to 1960.

Anyway, according to my memory of the article, on the show they used the word “cowabunga” for bad things and “cowagooba” for things that were good.

When I was younger my aunts and uncles told me that “cowabunga” was a term that surfers used when they wiped out (which fits with the something bad explanation). An tmnt diction was styled after surfer talk, which completes that path..

So, now when I search for “cowagooba” on goo goo I only get one result:

Mr. Smarty Pants Language Facts
According to TV announcer John Tesh, when he was a kid, “cowabunga” was used to describe something bad and “cowagooba” was used to describe something good.

Which is not very authoritative. Is it?

I recently got the indication that globjaman (really gulab jaman) is a common search term leading to here where people would find the answer to What’s a globjaman?, which shows the need I fulfilled by helping inform people of their mispelling.

I don’t think that cowagooba will be as popular a search word.