More and more news websites are opening up their archives and dropping subscription solutions, but we rarely hear about the effects of such policy shifts. Now the people at danish daily Information share their experiences since opening and search-optimizing the archive last autumn. Visits doubled in two months, and half of the visitors find the website via Google searches. That’s a very large share of traffic in relation to what we usually hear from Norwegian news sites, but maybe more in line with international numbers. Like several Swedish and (so far) one Norwegian news site, Information will now also consider a trackback solution to include links to blogs that comment on Information stories.

(via Dagens Medier).

UPDATE: Well worth noticing, of course, that the Wall Street Journal Online will not be 100 % free under Murdoch after all. Interesting to note in light of the above:

For the past several months, the paper also has run a test with Google News: Online readers can come to the Journal’s site from Google News and read any individual article free but are blocked from entering many other parts of the site. The goal is to capitalize on the traffic that comes from search engines and let users sample the Journal to encourage them to subscribe.

(via Martin Jönsson).