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.
They should only charge for articles that are true, or where the reporter actually did the work, instead of sitting at home in his flat in Brooklyn smoking dope.
In the Netherlands there are already paid subscribtions for online content of newspapers. For instance the Volkskrant offers a subscription for receiving the paper newspaper only on saturday and on weekdays you can watch the articles online.
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
I live in the DC area, so the Washington Post is my big local paper. I subscribe to the Sunday edition (its like $10 for 10 weeks). All I really want is the "bag o' stuff" that comes with it, full of ads, comics, Parade, etc. The rest of the paper I prefer to read online. I wish they'd give me an option of paying for the bag of stuff. I don't mind supporting them, but I don't want to create the waste of me having a physical paper I don't want to read.
So Washington Post people, if you read this, and you do because you've quoted people from Slashdot in articles, sell me the bag o' stuff by itself and you can keep the money you would've spent on printing my Sunday paper.
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.
...for them to get it right.
First of all, the $2.95 per article is nuts. That plan should be DOA.
Now think of how much it costs them to print millions of pages of dead-tree copies of their newspaper. There is enormous potential for the NYT to cut costs by switching (not entirely, of course) to a web/subscription content delivery model. Not to mention the positive effect such a move would have on the environment.
For a 'progressive' press mogul like the NYT, a leaner, greener newspaper makes sense.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
The best way to do this is via a google (or microsoft) micropayment system. Sort of like millicent .. except it's not as intrusive and is integrated with google desktop and internet explorer. Instead of having to fill out a form and address everytime .. a user can have a monthly limit of $25 (this limit can be by the broker themselves since they dont want to be over liable .. they can also restrict that companies or individuals cant get paid more than a certain amount from any one individual .. other anti fraud schemes will also be needed) .. anyway .. the point is that with a IE or google desktop integrated micropayment system .. it should be possible for individuals to sell music, tv shows, movies and other stuff. There needs to be an Open DRM standard though .. or musicians won't play along. Maybe the standard can be haxx0red or whatever .. thats inevitable .. but the casual/easy copying has to be made difficult in order to encourage people to actually reward the artists of songs or tv programs they like.
These guys are dumber than dirt.
Why charge at all for outdated content? Don't they remember the old journalistic saying that today's news is tomorrow's fishwrap?
Put the archives up for free -- that way people will link into them and pump up the Times' search-engine juice. Then sell context sensitive advertising on the old stories a la Google AdWords. Hell, the Times has an entire ad staff -- they could come up with their own contextual-ads program, cut out Google, and keep all the money for themselves. And advertisers would pay a pretty penny to get placed -- you don't think a spot on a NYT story about bicycles, say, would be attractive to a bicycle manufacturer? Especially if that story wasn't behind a paywall, so it got enough Google-juice to get pumped up to the first page of search results for "bicycles"?
I bet they'd make an order of magnitude more money that way than they ever would off selling subscriptions to the archives...
Read my blog.
-- 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
This is worrying because the NYT is considered one of the 'most reputable' newspapers in the world. For example: I do a bit of work for The Center for Cooperative Research. This is an open source website that is designed to create timelines about US politics by following news stories. To make the timelines as 'legitimate' as possible, we are encouraged to use NYT articles. Now that public access is restricted, it is making it more difficult for this open source project to continue with broad 'legitimacy'.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
If you have a NYC public library card you can access the past year for free via NYPL.org
I'll just search Google News and then reference the cache.
"...$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
The numbers are in the right ballpark. I pay $35/yr to get access to all of their current and archived crosswords and puzzles. I have no problem paying this amount since I consider it to be of value to me. If you don't consider their week-old online content to be worth X dollars, don't pay them X dollars.
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.
In the offline world, newspapers and magazines charge for the current issues while the archives are freely available through libraries. Why should it be reversed in the online world?
It's completely backwards to make the current week free and the archives Pay-per-view or subscription-only. It makes much more sense to charge a subscription to the current news (whether to access the current day, the current week, or the current month), and make the older stuff freely available. First of all, there's a lot more people interested in today's news than in last year's news, meaning revenues would be higher. (That means more money for the low IQers in the audience.) It fits in line with the offline business model. It meets the customer's expectations better. And it makes the whole site more Internet-friendly.
Frankly, I don't understand why more sites don't follow that plan. Charge for access to the current week (the most valuable content on your site on any given day) and, after that, let the bloggers and everyone else have at it for free.
Whenever I see an article that grabs my interest, I print make a PDF copy of it, and then later on I send it to my gmail account with meaning description in the subject line.
Not perfect, but perfectly workable for most.
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 would I pay for any NY Times news story when I can get the same story direct from the source for free.
[Insert pithy quote here]
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.
Dear NYT,
I just let my WSJ subscription lapse. Why? because of the total lock-down of discussing the conntent with others. The Economist on the other hand I am renewing, even though most of the content is free. Why? I value the content, and the material is open for others to see, with the exception of specific business intelligence.
Where do you stand dear NYT? I would say with the Economist. If you keep the news free, open up the past, and charge for all of the other stuff--arts, magazine...--I would likely pay and more importantly, continue to pay.
Do not do focus groups on this! Find out the retention rate--renewals--for these publications, and find the model that fits. Lets hope that it's not the WSJ! One year relationships suck.
The NY Times is one of the most reputable papers in the US. But, if you want the paper that most foreigners turn to for impartial, unbiased news, check out the Christian Science Monitor. As right-wing as the paper sounds, it is actually quite impartial (this coming from a liberal).
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
Registration is required before you can read this comment. I promise, it's a really good comment, and well worth your money. Can't afford it now? Check back in a few weeks, and it will be almost free, or feel free to send me $50 now, and you can view all of my comments for the next year.
This sig has been removed pending an investigation.
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"
Online for up to half the cost of the print medium (7-day in-city subscription rate), and here's why:
I can only get delivery at $3/week sunday only - that's $150 per year for one day a week's paper.
They have to put the whole thing online somewhere anyway, that's how newspapers are made today (I still like to think it's Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell doing it all at high volume, but alas...) They've already paid the mortgage on the infrastructure, the part of it that makes things public html costs not as much as all of the tech they need in order to get the paper out every day. This is a lot like the phone companies cutting prices once everyone saw the internet model and realized that they didn't have to run a special/new wire from my house in CT to so-and-so in CA so we could talk. They don't have to wake someone up to create a web page just because I logged on.
They won't get a lot of people who are online-y to cart a pile of paper home no matter how attractive they seem to make it. (and "attractive" seems to mean raise the out of town prices to horriffic levels - how come USAToday costs the same all over the country but NYT seems to be delivered outside of NYC by gold-plated burros who eat caviar? Hint - distributed printing)
So I'll (and lots like me'll) will get their news online somewhere, but not at paper-based prices and weights.
They'll have me at up to half subscription rate. There's a sweet spot there somewhere. It's fair, it's not the smug "information wants to be free" half of the argument. Maybe it's a mexican standoff, but they won't get me at print, and I can get news lots of places for free.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I'd certainly pay $50/yr for access to the archives. I read the NYTimes daily online, from work, and love it. And I get the print version at home. But there's many times I'm talking to someone about something, or I see something happen in the world, and I think "hey wasn't there a NYT article on that"? But then I can't get to the article without paying $2.95/article for articles older than a week, or whatever they currently charge. Which... I'm not going to do. Somewhere in the $30-50/yr range for unlimited access to the archives seems reasonable to me though.
-Daniel
The Slashdot "info should be free" crowd is dead wrong on this. Certainly that would be best for YOU the consumer, but not best for NYT, which is point of the article. There is no reason to make the archives free since the paper itself is already free.
Who is their audience? Researchers who are generally looking for one specific article, and people who need the resources often. I think they should do both plans, and probably more - a monthly plan, a subscription to just one section (like "Business section" for $15 a year), etc. But I think the single articles will sell more, at around a 4 to 1 ratio to subscriptions.
Remember also the unlimited year pass is just for the previous year. NYT has quite lucrative contracts with Lexis Nexus and others which obviously makes them good money and obviously charges a steep amount for access. They might not even be legally able to "go free" with the archives depending on their contracts.
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
I can see an interesting side effect coming up if NYT decides to do this, especially at the cost figure they're proposing.
Specifically, I could see a move like this being a shot in the arm for public libraries, especially if it sparks other newspapers and news agencies to do it.
Consider: You could either pay the fee and access the thing from your home system, or you can exert a little effort and hit up your local public library. Access to the same material would (likely) be at no extra cost to you. Heck, you wouldn't even have to pay for gas if you took public transit.
Even if, for some reason, you still need Internet access, many libraries have free wireless. The Seattle main (downtown) library, as one example, has both wired and wireless Internet access available at no charge to its patrons (note that VPN only works if you use Cisco LEAP or Microsplatt's PPTP).
Keep the peace(es).
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
One of the problems that the NYT is facing is that we no longer live in an age where information is scarce.
Up until a few years ago, regular, in-depth, quality information about what was going on in the world was only available to the average person through a few sources - The daily newspaper was chief among these sources followed by radio, tv, and magazines.
Now, with internet access becoming ubiquitous people have more news/information than they can deal with. We are practically drowning in media. The question is: Why would we want to subscribe to another source of information?
There is a niche for the NYT. That niche is in limiting and filtering information. The paper needs to market itself as a relief from information overload.