Weekdays it's a quid, Saturday £1.50, Sunday £2.
This should be interesting, somebody had to be the first of the biguns to do this, but if a substantial portion of the industry does not follow suit, I see the Times Online becoming quickly irrelevant.
I agree; someone had to be the one to do it first with a non-business paper and the Times is a good choice. The Financial Times (owned by rivals Pearson) is already behind a pay wall (since about the middle of last year) and does well enough. The Times is a logical choice to try next. I think the Times already charged for access to the online versions of the daily concise & cryptic crosswords, too, as a testbed (which I think also did well).
Anyone with a subscription to the print edition will be able to access the site for free, which is a good move.
Fundamentally, I don't think the site will attract too many (if any)
new subscribers as there are currently plenty of free other sites. But if it does well in retaining its current
regular readership (ie. accepting the loss of those coming to the Times from search engines), then I can definitely see other industry players following suit and placing at least some more content behind a pay wall.
News International won't mind losing random readers arriving from search engines or links. The revenue they got from those sources is minimal. What they're trying to do is retain brand value to their core subscribers. This is of course risky for a brand, since it sacrifices brand exposure in favour of exclusivity. Only premium titles with unique content could possibly manage it, which is the FT succeeds. The Times, being more mainstream & less unique, is much riskier. But it's worth rolling the dice, as the revenue implications of failing are fairly limited.
The biggest problem is not really the fairly minimal cost, but the hurdle of actually paying that cost. Pulling out your credit card or whatever and signing up, is much more time-consuming than just chucking a quid at your newsagent. The lack of a cheap & secure micropayment system for vendors making payment a one-click process, may well be what stops this business model for now. But it's only a matter of time before such a micropayment system evolves, and then, this sort of business model will become much practical.
Anyway, it's definitely an interesting experiment and I htink it's worth doing, from a business perspective.
EDIT: finally, as a coda to the above, and while we still have free access to Times Online to enjoy such coincidences, check out the byline
on this article... 
