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.
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
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.
Wow, library? I'd rather pay the fifty bucks...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.