NEW YORK (Bloomberg) - The New York Times is turning its cooking website and app into a subscription service, betting readers will pay for the content despite free recipes being widely available online.

Starting on Wednesday, NYT Cooking will charge US$5 (S$7) every four weeks, or US$65 a year, for access to more than 18,000 recipes from staffers like Melissa Clark and Sam Sifton.

The service will rely on a metered model, meaning readers can get some content for free on the web, but everything on a dedicated iPhone app will be reserved for subscribers.

Created in 2014, NYT Cooking has amassed about 10 million monthly readers.

The Times has a mixed record when charging for apps and online content.

Digital subscribers to its news product have soared in the past year, thanks largely to interest in the last US presidential election and the Trump administration.

But in recent years the Times also shut down two paid apps, NYT Now and NYT Opinion, after they failed to attract large audiences.