Nytimes.com to require subscriptions

[Arthur Dent]

If I recall, salon.com once went behind a paywall with disastrous results, before giving it up. Granted, salon isn't exactly the Grey Lady. But I do wonder if online readership will drop to an extent that makes the loss of ad revenue greater than the revenue generated by the subscriptions.

Actually, The Times also tried this once before for certain content like op-eds (TimesSelect) from 2005-2007. It was a big failure. Not sure why they think this will be better. Perhaps because it is now more comprehensive?

[Mary1966]

I like to read British newspapers on the internet, and the Times of London went to a pay service a while back. I simply deleted their page from my bookmarks and continued using the 7 other major newspapers that are free.

[Arthur Dent]

Yeah, so this thing is apparently a total joke which can be defeated by advanced techniques like deleting your browser cookies. When they want you to pay, they apparently send the whole article, but stamp a notice on top asking you to subscribe. There's already a four line script available that strips out this notice. In addition, you can apparently read any article by searching for it on Google News and clicking through that way. Just found out that this has apparently worked for years as a way to get around the WSJ paywall.

This article has more. It speculates that The Times is basically ok with some people evading their defenses on the grounds that they still generate advertising revenue and probably weren't going to pay in any case. But they're still going to drive away some substantial fraction of their non-technically sophisticated online readers with this.

Also, I just got an email offering me a free subscription for the rest of 2011 in exchange for nothing. This whole thing is weird.

[Arthur Dent]

More from an interview with a Time executive. Sweet. So, I can continue to post links here without worry that people can't read them.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/2011031 ... and-apple/

Peter Kafka: Just to be clear, when the Times says non-subscribers can read stories above their 20-per-month limit if they come from referring links, you’re not just talking about Twitter and Facebook, but any link from any site, right?

Martin Nisenholtz: That’s correct.

Kafka: It could be the Journal. It could be a blog, it could be the Financial Times, anything on the Web, right?

Nisenholtz: Yes. The only other thing is that Google has a methodology where they can limit the number of inbound links per day, and we intend to take them up on it.

Kafka: So that’s Google doing the actual gating, not you?

Nisenholtz: Right. They had made this feature available prior to us going pay, so it’s not like it was inspired by us per se. We’re just taking advantage of it.

Kafka: Why limit Google’s links, but not any other site’s?

Nisenholtz: I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we’ve done, tons of people actually say, “Jeez, we’ve felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we’re supporting a valuable institution.” At the same time we want to make sure that we’re not being gamed, to the extent that we can be.

[lukethedrifter]

I don't understand why it's such great sport to mock the NYT or anyone over something like this. They are trying to figure out how (not who) to remain viable. They are trying to get paid for what they do.
Why is it such a joke?

It's true that the Times of London went from (I'm making up these numbers) 2million hits/day to 20k when they went behind a paywall, at least according to the interview I heard. It doesn't appear that this model is going to work but the other one doesn't really work either.

[Arthur Dent]

The joke is that they apparently spent a couple years and spent $40 million to develop a paywall that will catch only a minority of users to irritate them with requests to pay that can be easily be evaded both through rather rather simple technical tricks and back doors they explicitly chose to build in so as to continue to attract casual readers. What can be the point of that?

And yes, the New York Times does deserve to get to get the resources they need to produce professional journalism. This model for doing it just doesn't make any sense. In any case, even in the old print only days, newspaper revenue overwhelmingly came from advertising and not subscriptions. The usual story was the that subscriptions covered the cost of printing and delivering the paper with advertising paying the reporters and owners. Now the printing and delivery costs are approximately zero, but they can't seem to sell online ads for as much money as the print ones.

The real crisis isn't at The Times but in local newspapers who have essentially no hope of getting readers to pay sigificant money to get at their websites.

[greenback44]

The joke is that they apparently spent a couple years and spent $40 million to develop a paywall that will catch only a minority of users to irritate them with requests to pay that can be easily be evaded both through rather rather simple technical tricks and back doors they explicitly chose to build in so as to continue to attract casual readers. What can be the point of that?

It sounds like the NYT has two types of revenue in mind here. The first type comes from the public broadcasting-style of reader who wants to support NYT because they've earned that support through journalistic excellence. The NYT is putting a number on the suggested donation, on the theory that concrete terms will encourage people to donate on a regular basis. Maybe iTunes is a better comparison than NPR.

The second target is the technically incompetent. Just as an example, my mother pays AOL $10 a month for a security placebo. She got into a nasty fight with an Obama supporter during the 2008 primaries, and at some point AOL suggested she should subscribe to a premium security package. It's not virus software or anything like that; I don't know what it actually does, and neither does my mother, but AOL apparently has told investors that a big chunk of AOL's revenue comes from people who pay for services they never use. Paying for useless stuff is a pretty common phenomenon among the technologically illiterate.

Neither group represents a true homo economicus, so any kind of economic analysis will hit a dead end. I guess you can question the ethics of picking on the second group, but they are receiving a real product from the NYT.

[cards2468]

If getting top quality news was a major priority to me, I'd get a subscription. I mean, I have a subscription to read Baseball America's website when there are many free options for following prospects, but I just feel that BA does a superior job and that I enjoy the ease of having everything I need at 1 site.


As for the cost with developing the paywall, I'm sure some economist proved the $40 mil was worth it in bringing in viewers while protecting the system.

[TheoSqua]

If the system uses cookies to store the monthly pageviews i'm pretty sure I could show you 100 developers that would have happily written this for 10 grand.

I don't understand how it cost anything clost to 40million. 4million would still be an absurd price.

$400,000 would likely be paying top-dollar for every aspect of the development. $5m for marketing and promotion maybe.......I just don't see how those numbers add up.

[cards2468]

If the system uses cookies to store the monthly pageviews i'm pretty sure I could show you 100 developers that would have happily written this for 10 grand.

I don't understand how it cost anything clost to 40million. 4million would still be an absurd price.

$400,000 would likely be paying top-dollar for every aspect of the development. $5m for marketing and promotion maybe.......I just don't see how those numbers add up.

Perhaps they bought the rights to the source code and are going to sell it to other sites for use?