US magazine Sports Illustrated will tomorrow launch a free online archive of all the text and many of the pictures that it has published in its 53-year history.

The new archive is expected to expected to account for 5 percent of the magazine’s online revenue in its first year, and even more in subsequent years, Mark Ford, president of the Sports Illustrated group at publisher Time Inc, told the New York Times.

The archive, called The Vault, will quadruple the number of pages on the site, vastly increasing its exposure to search engines.