The New York Times has decided to end its two year old TimeSelect subscription program that cost $49.95 a year and provided access to columnists’ work and the newspaper’s last 20 years of archives. The move by the Times opens up all work from 1987 to present and from 1851 to 1922 which is in the public domain.

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.

According to the Times coverage, TimeSelect generated about $10 million a year in revenue from 227,000 subscribers (out of 787,000).

The Times new strategy is to monitize traffic coming in from search engines and 3rd-party links. The newspaper receives 13 million unique visitors each month.