NI told us in June, soon after Rupert Murdoch declared his papers would at some point start charging for content: “We’re looking at options for monetising our online propositions because we really value our content - but we haven’t taken a decision on that yet”. The Sunday Times could be test bed for a charging model.

It’s no secret that editor John Witherow has for years wanted a separate website for his paper’s content, which is currently subsumed into Times Online, just as Guardian.co.uk swallows Observer stories or Mail Online publishes Mail On Sunday articles. But can a Sunday newspaper website ever work? The paper publishes the sort of content news execs feel confident about charging for: exclusive news, columnists, features and the rest, published just once a week. Although, you can read similar news from other Sunday papers online for free and the title doesn’t have the same must-have niche news that FT.com successfully sells online.

Times Online clocked up 21.1 million unique monthly users in July according to ABCe and that number—let alone a division of it—isn’t enough to generate big online profits. Given the centrality of print to NI’s ethos, It could well be the site is used as a marketing exercise to increase the paper’s 1.21 million circulation.