In a surprise October 1st announcement, the New York Times told employees that they are planning to cut 100 newsroom jobs. A major reason cited for this cutback is the failure of NYT Opinion, a digital content app launched with much fanfare just this past June. So what went wrong in such a short amount of time?For starters, the price was too high. A monthly subscription cost $6, while the digital subscription price for access to the entire newspaper is $15 a month. There were some savings to be had in subscribing to the NYT Opinion, but the price clearly did not justify access to such a small portion of the overall paper.The management of the paper has always claimed that a significant portion of readers are only interested in the opinion pages, and has attempted to monetize this portion of their audience before, but with little success. The Opinion pages were behind a premium paywall called Times Select from 2005-2007, before the paper made all its content available for free until re-instituting its current paywall in 2011.In a memo to employees outlining the move, CEO Mark Thompson and publisher Arthur Sulzberger stated that the app “hasn’t attracted the kind of new audience it would need to be truly scalable.”The second failed attempt to monetize these pages should illustrate to other digital publishers the difference between popular/high traffic content and content offerings that consumers are actually willing to pay for. To put it another way, people are always willing to read someone else’s opinion, but rarely willing to pay for it.NYT Opinion’s launch earlier this year was part of an overall digital strategy that involved the release of a cooking app and streaming news feed on its home page called Watching.The paper will continue to offer digital subscriptions to its Opinion section for $1.50 per month via their website.