July 9 (Bloomberg) -- New York Times Co. said in a survey of print subscribers that it’s considering a $5 monthly fee for access to its namesake newspaper’s Web site.

Times Co. also asked whether subscribers would be willing to pay a discounted fee of $2.50 a month for access to the site, in the poll confirmed today by Catherine Mathis, a company spokeswoman. Nytimes.com, the most visited among newspapers’ sites, is currently free.

Times Co. is contemplating additional sources of revenue as marketers slow spending on the Internet. Ad sales at the publisher’s sites, also including about.com and boston.com, fell 8 percent and 3.5 percent in the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2008 respectively. They gained 6.5 percent last year.

“The question here for consumers is the psychological barrier of now paying when you were getting it for free before, and you’re going to lose some readers as a result,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell Inc. in Burlingame, California. “The New York Times will also have to evaluate what this means for ad rates as they lose readers.”

Times Co., based in New York, lost 11 cents, or 2.2 percent, to $4.80 at 4:15 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have fallen 35 percent this year.

The New York Times had an average of 647,695 weekday home delivery subscribers as of the 26 weeks ended March 29, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations data. That doesn’t include single-copy sales or third-party sales. Its site is the most visited among news sites, according to ComScore Inc. data.

News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal charges for access to some of its Web site’s content and publishers including Hearst Corp. and E.W. Scripps Co. have said they are considering pay models.

Monthly Fee

Times Co. is selling assets and has cut pay and jobs to save money. First-quarter advertising revenue at the publisher plunged 27 percent, and the company said in April that it expected a similar decline in the second quarter.

The New York Times’s site “is considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia,” the survey stated.

In 2007, the New York Times ended a two-year experiment of charging users for some opinion and editorial content. At its peak, 200,000 users paid for the service, called Times Select, and it generated $10 million a year in revenue, Bill Keller, the newspaper’s executive editor, said this year in an online question-and-answer session.

Times Co. will probably begin charging users to access its news on mobile devices before it does so on its Web sites, Martin Nisenholtz, the head of digital operations, said last month. Mobile devices accommodate less advertising than the Web, he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 9, 2009 17:31 EDT