If you're interested in what's happening at the New York Times with TimesSelect and About.com, it's worth checking out the profile of New York Times Digital CEO Martin Nisenholtz over at adBUMb. Nisenholtz defends the decision by the New York Times to introduce a premium paid content feature:

"Defending the company’s turn to paid content - which has been the topic of great debate on the web (not all of it positive) - Nisenholtz assures us that the outcry is misplaced. “97% of the Times website remains free after the launch of Times Select. The Times is not putting its website into a pay window. It simply created a tier on top of the free site, and it is a way for us to package more stuff for subscribers to The New York Times.”

Nisenholtz also offers a golden nugget about the current business model of all Internet publishers:

"The business model that most Internet publishers have is very simple. It’s the number of unique visitors, times the times they visit you during a given period, times the amount of pages they view per visit, times the rate per page. It’s not rocket science. It’s basically a straightforward formula that all of us live by, whether you’re the New York Times or Weblogs, Inc."

That's cool - the New York Times and Weblogs, Inc. in the same sentence without any touch of irony.