WASHINGTON (AFP) - The New York Times announced Monday it would stop charging for access to certain articles and archives on its web site, reversing a marketing plan implemented two years ago.

The widely read newspaper, also known as the "Old Gray Lady," said it was canceling the pay-for-access system to some columnists' work and back articles because of the greater potential for revenue from online advertising.

The change takes effect Monday at midnight (Tuesday 0400 GMT).

The old program, called TimesSelect, required readers to pay 49.95 dollars per year or 7.95 a month in order to read the work of popular columnists such as Thomas Friedman, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman.

Now, the entire site will be accessible for free, including archives from 1987 to the present as well as those from 1851 to 1922. Some charges will remain for archival work between 1923 to 1986, and some will be free, it said.

The newspaper said the TimesSelect program had met targets by drawing 227,000 paying subscribers and generating about 10 million dollars a year in revenue.

"But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising," said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

The newspaper decided more page views and ad revenue could be generated by "indirect readers" coming via search engines and links from other sites.

"What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others," Schiller said, declining to project revenue or say how much increased traffic the paper expects by ending the charges.

The Wall Street Journal is the only other major US newspaper to charge for acccess to most articles on its website, and its one million paying online readers bring the company around 65 million dollars in revenue, the Times said.