Slashdot Mirror
New York Times Exploring how to Charge for Content
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times is
mulling subscription for Internet Archives. It doesn't appear that the free (but subscription required - BugMeNot to the rescue!) ability to read NYT articles less than a week old would change. However, instead of paying $2.95 per article for stuff that is more than a week old, one idea being floated is an annual fee of $49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year." (More below.)
Mr. Christmas Lights continues "The WSJ has been pretty successful with their online subscriptions - over 700,000 people currently pay $79 ($39 if you get the print edition) a year for full online access of the last 30 days of articles - the story above happens to be in their public area. But they are a notable exception, with media organizations struggling to charge for News now that it is widely available for free on the Internet. For example, Slashdot recently discussed the AP's plan to charge members to post content online. Will the "GoogleZon" end up replacing the 4th Estate as depicted in the entertaining and informative 8 minute EPIC video?"
Or we could just explore other sources of news than the New York Times. I can sympathise with their need for revenue, but they are certainly not worth $50 a year for me to access, and certainly not worth $2.95 per article.
...would pay for it; it's the best news service coming out of America right now.
English guy.
Their best bet would be to offer both. A $2.95/article and $49.99/yr for those who wanted one or the other. If your doing research and need 1 old article, then your best bet is to pay $2.95 for it. But if your researching, say, how common it was for Bush to be mentioned on the front page since he took office, your going to be reading A LOT of articles, and paying 50 bucks is a much better deal.
Free MacMini
Why should I pay? How about I just goto the library and pull out the article I am looking for in their microfilm/microfiche archive? Even small Universities have those going all the way back to the 1890's, as do most libraries.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
All these subscriptions at the same time as online advertising is on the rise...or at least so the Economist says it is. Advertising revenues by Google and Yahoo are predicted to rival the combined prime-time ad revenues of America's three big television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC. And the NY Times uses google ads, so if google ads are making cash, then the NY Times is also probably making cash from those google ads...I guess just not enough. Nothing's ever enough though.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
What does this imply about internet advertising? Do paid subscribers also get ads along with the online content? This seems like another indication that on-line ads may not pay out.
Yorkspace
I see this as completely reasonable.
I feel like news outlets almost have a civic responsibility to have (at least some level of) news for free for the masses just for the sake of keeping various entities "in check" --mainly government and business.
However, at some point news at a week old isnt "news" anymore. Think about the majority of the types of people that need archived news articles -- researchers, other news writers, authors, statisticians etc. In my opinion these type of people who work for other companies or work for other interests and whose existence piggybacks at least a little bit on news articles that are archived should pay their fair share. I don't see too many private citizen's need to access archieved news.
Also, one should view this as a exponential growing cost of bandwidth and storage space for archived articles (especially for the NYTimes with a hundred years of history and the sheer amount of content that they have) not necessarily as a main revenue stream for breaking news.
But thats just my $0.02
"...$49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year"
I would be a bit more inclined to pay for a news service, if I had access to an archive that could go back a little further than a year.
The faster the processor, the better the connection, the more money you spend on getting the most up to date, modern, super-duper computer... the quicker the ads come across, the more spam you get.
You know the old saying: "A sucker is born every minute," we can rehash that to: "A sucker spends money on information that can be retrieved elsewhere for free every minute."
The free internet died many years ago, probably around 1995 when AOL decided to give its users access to usenet.
But wouldn't the past articles be avaliable at your local library for free? I mean, if you really wanted to read NYT and do not have the additional means, going to your good old library is a possible solution. I think I remember what they look like...lots of books, newspaper organizers.....
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I don't think it would appeal to the average consumer - 50 bucks a year, 3 bucks an article, both sound about the same to me - as in, sounds like I won't be reading that article - but I wonder if NTY even believes it would. For a research reference, it could be well worth it though. I could see political campaigns, lobbyists, PR agencies, a lot of different things finding a $50 fee well worthwhile for being able to get that instant access online to the NYT archives.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
This seem like a giant leap backward to me. Everything I've ever read seems to suggest that micropayments are the way forward (pay for what you use - hell, I'd certainly like it), and here the NYT are moving to a less granular pricing model.
Subscriptions are stupid, because unless you're going to use $50/year you aren't going to bother taking out a subscription, and will instead go elsewhere. Subscriptions force you to make a choice: am I "A NYT Subscriber" or not? If I'm just dropping by the NYT site (eg, from a random newsblog link), I'm not going to fork out a $50.00 subscription to view a single article. Could I view that same single article for, say, $0.25, I'd happily pay it.
Affordable (and truly micro) micropayments allow you to use what you want, when you want, so you can "impulse-buy" information however you want. Subscriptions force you to enter into a long-term commitment, and as such will be avoided liek the plague by everyone apart from those who likely *already* have a NYT subscription (a much smaller subset of users).
Ok, $3.00 per article is hardly micropayments, but if I were NYT I'd be looking to move towards MPs, rather than away from them. It does look like they're confusing "overpricing their content" with "the failure of their whole approach".
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
If people are accessing it...
LexisNexis makes a fortune charging for access to their gigantic database of outdated content... why shouldn't NYT try to get a piece of the pie?
evil adrian
With the NYTimes vast news archive they have the potential to be one of the best sources of past and current news via google.
Remember, google is based on linking. Right now, no one links to the NYTimes unless it's today's article. If they allowed free access to their entire past archive, people would be posting links all the time (ex, an anti-Bush site would have a series of links about him from the past few years). This would translate into advertising revenue for the Times and more internet clout in general.
The way they've set it up now, this doesn't exist. And I don't believe there is a big market for paying for old news (not that big anyway). Students and researchers use libraries, people at home use Wikipedia or whatever.
The NYTimes should be working to be THE information news resource of world events.
Here Finland, we have a saying:
It's not the person who asks who is stupid. It's the person who pays.
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
You've got a good idea there, but you have to remember that these guys are scared shitless of losing their revenue streams. As the print subscriptions (and advertising revenue) inevitably decline, they want something familiar to be in control off. They already do web advertising, so the actual quantities they could increase their google juice and web revenue is a big scary question mark in their eyes.
I think there's definite wisdom they could take from your idea though... lose the stupid registration and bump free access to two weeks or a month to increase linkage. For older content they should continue to offer the $2.95 per article as well as several subscription choices. $50/yr for 100 articles or $20/month for unlimited access seem like the best choices. The $50/yr for access only to one year's worth of articles seems lame to me, but maybe some people need that kind of reasearching ability?
It strikes me that the internet is like street performance. You make a noise. If people like the noise you should provide a simple system for people to provide a small sum of money.
Surely this is the business model that should be adopted by the arts on the internet. People already earn a living busking, and thats just performing on a busy high street, with the internet there is the potential to busk to the world.
Accountants may hate this model, but with the huge variety of GDPs and age ranges that have access to the internet it appears the fairest
Just to be clear Busking is an English word for street performer (not sure if our American friends use it).
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Once we finally blocked them all out, and thus taken away one of the more important reasons a website can deliver content for free, we whine again when they are starting to charge money.
I myself am quite happy with searching for free sources, taking the (imo, not too obtrusive) ads for granted.
Why should I pay? How about I just goto the library and pull out the article
One of these people who's time is worthless. For the rest of us, spending $50 for 1 year's access is a better deal than spending an hours time going to the library for an article.
The NYTimes is in a difficult position.
If they charge for subscription, they are in danger of losing a vast portion of their readership, and no longer be the paper of record (well, they may still be the Paper of Record, but the distinction won't be important. They will no longer be the News Source of Record). They are competing with AP, Reuters and the BBC in this realm, all of which will continue to pump out all the international news anyone could hope for.
If the NYTimes hopes to justify the expense by touting it's higher-quality product, it will have to explain how it's reporting standards are lower then the WSJ and magazines like The Economist, both of which have far better reporting then The Gray Lady.
The price isn't horrible in the abstract, it's that the paper isn't worth the price. I often consider subscribing to the WSJ at $70/year. It is possible that one of the main reasons I don't subscribe is that the NYTimes is available for free. If the NYTimes starts charging, the result, for me, would probably be a subscription to the WSJOnline.
So, in order to compete with the WSJ, the NYTimes may be forced to improve it's product. That is not a bad thing, at all. Although it will be a lot of work, the NYTimes has a better chance of reaching a $50/yr value then most other online news sources.
Except Wall Street Journal past articles are usually more valuable. There's two kinds of data, one that goes outdated really fast, becoming useless really fast, and the kind that adds to the "knowledge base", making the total sum of knowledge more valuable. Usually "flash news" and "forecasts" where shallow memes and unconfirmed info is passed just to keep you "standing by" for more, later, is pretty worthless, except of the sentimental value. On the other hand, in-depth articles lose very little over time. The piece about landing on the Moon may be cool to watch, but if you want to learn about the Moon and the mission, you look for an aftermatch article.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The New York Times has digitized every edition from 1851 to 2001. It's searchable and instead of printing up some plain 'ol text, you see the actual article in PDF as it appeared when published. It's incredible stuff and would be well worth an annual fee for history buffs.
www.lonseidman.com
I hope they can make a go of it.
Everyone is a monday morning quarterback when it comes to journalism, but what most people don't realize is that good journalism is hard. Like, really hard. Exhausting. The workflow of a journalist is: conceive of story; research story, find sources, interview sources; write story. You do this independently, usually with little or no help from your editor. If you're in the news department, you do this in one day, sometimes multiple times in a day. And you repeat this every day you're at work. It's really, really hard, and lots of people burn out.
This is a little bit like a manager saying to a coder, "Can you build me a killer app? How long will that take - a few days maybe?" No matter what people on the sidelines think of the profession, getting into the NY Times means being a journalist at the top of your game. They should be paid well, and the paper has every right to generate revenue in whatever way they can.
Yes you get quality news in Slashdot and blogs. You wanna know why? Because there is critique. Maybe the article itself might be leaning one way or another, but the comments will provide the necessary explanations or corrections.
I find Slashdot fascinating because of the comments. Yes there are idiots, but there are also very intelligent people making intelligent comments. Where do you get that in newspapers? Newspapers have a single editor (or small team) with certain slants.
Take for example anything that Fox news produces. There is a slant in their news. Can anybody critique the comments Fox news has made? No, because they control the medium and the reactions. With Slashdot and Blogs that is simply not the case. Slashdot and blogs represent the voices of the people! And after all is that not what the news is all about, the people?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
If old news is so worthless for you, why the hell do you care if they're charging for it? Just don't buy it.
On the one hand you're saying old news has no value, and on the other you're whining that it should be free. How, exactly, does that make the Times the idiot?
If your site has content worth taking my time to seek out and read, and you have tasteful ads which are related to the content (thereby presupposing I'd be interested in what you're peddling), I'm more than happy to look at them (and I've even been known to follow their links occasionally). But, if i have to look a some stupid, flashing animation out of the corner of my eye while I'm trying to concentrate on the content of an article, I get annoyed very quickly. It would be one thing if I could "unclick" the Play or Loop option for those things but somehow they still play and loop. I've been known to print the article out just to read it without distractions before.
I am your customer. If you treat me with disrespect, I will move on and not come back *cough*Real Player*cough*. The reason I paid for Pithhelmet was so that I could go out of my way to block ads when I'm using Safari. The reason I downloaded AdBlock was so I could go out of my way to block ads when I'm using FireFox. The reason I go out of my way (and am willing to pay for ad blocking software, it that web sites have abused advertising (and me) to such and extent that I will do almost anything to avoid it.
There would be no need for these types of measures if advertisers and site-owners had respect for me as their customer. If they now feel they must charge for content, fine. I am your customer, set the pricing respectfully. I'm not stupid, I can buy the whole paper with current news for a buck fifty. You want to charge me $3 for an oudated article that cost $.000002 to manage, store and retrieve? I'll go elsewhere, thanks.
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution