Last week the Chicago Sun-Times announced that it had become the first major US newspaper to start accepting Bitcoins, thereby blazing a trail for subscription content publishers that’s sure to have countless others watching.Well, yesterday some data emerged that suggests the Sun-Times’s bet was a good one.Specifically, a full 11.3 percent of the publication’s new subscription orders this week were paid for via Bitcoin, according to a newsBTC report. That amounted to 7 purchases, and what’s interesting is that only two were made from Chicago. The others were from other parts in the United States — markets the Sun-Times doesn’t typically reach.”I’m actually blown away by the orders,” Josh Metnick, CTO at Sun-Times publisher Wrapports, told newsBTC. “The key metric will be measuring this over time. We got a really nice initial PR boost with this — now the question is, how will this affect sales over the next three, six, 12 months? How will we repurpose, modify our marketing locally as Bitcoin adoption grows, so that more and more every-day people understand the advantages of paying with Bitcoin?”Bitcoins have been nothing if not controversial in recent months, but they do offer publishers the advantage of low transaction rates — not to mention bank-free and potentially anonymous convenience for consumers.While that initial bump from the Sun-Times’s announcement is sure to be a factor, we have already seen predictions that alternative payments like bank transfers, direct debits, e-wallets, mobile payments and alternative currencies like Bitcoin will increasingly take hold in online transactions, reducing credit and debit card processing to less than half of such transactions by 2017. If you haven’t already started paying close attention to Bitcoins, now might be a good time.