I would definitely like to know what conclusions The Washington Post will draw from its experiment – extending archive access to 60 days to increase traffic to the site. No less than half of the traffic now comes to the site directly to stories via RSS, search engines and blogs, not through the main door. The WP wants to compare the increased revenue it can get this way with what they lose from archive subscription revenue.

A related approach is being tested in Norway, where parts of the monopoly newspaper archive Atekst has been made available on the visible web through the Sesam search engine. Here the “content owner” gets paid for each article that is viewed (smartly integrated in the search engine page, by the way). Sesam’s owner (the same as the owner of many of the newspapers in the archive, but not all) draws traffic to Sesam, and gets the ad revenues.