After two years, the New York Times is finally joining the Web 2.0 fad and sharing its content with the interweb. The Times spent the past two years charging $49.95 per year, or $7.95 each month, for archived content and its columnists under its TimesSelect program. Today the times announced its plans claiming their TimesSelect program met subscription expectations, but more growth could be found in advertising. “Our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, the senior vice president and general manager of NYTimes.com.

Finally. One of the last major paywalls has fallen under the realization that the web is a big place. If you won’t let people get your content, they’ll find the same thing somewhere else. With the Times’ news and commentary blocked by credit card charges, other web sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos were happy to fill the void. Now the Times has to make up for lost ground.

Obviously the New York Times will and has been a credible voice on the web. But the Times, as such an influential force, could have built the legitimacy of web media faster. Maybe they would have put more effort into creating original, interactive content rather than just replicating the newspaper.

I also wonder how web advertising might have accelerated had the Times opened up its decades of news stories to everyone. Everyone from random browsers to researchers could make use of these millions of new page views from a company that can get the big advertising deals. This could have generated millions more in web advertising as well as maybe exploring new advertising models and venues.

But now the Times can fully make its mark, as a fully Googleable resource of information. And we all know Google as the search engine of record.