NY Times Confident of 'First Click Free' Paywalls

eldavojohn writes "One thing you might notice on Slashdot is that when someone submits a story linking to nytimes.com, it doesn't always work. While it's not truly a paywall, it appears to stop the user and require registration... sometimes. If you noticed this and it's seems to be non-deterministic in when and where it asks you to login, you're simply noticing the latest strategy of 'first click free' being employed. We've heard that normal paywalls are a miserable failure (the Wall Street Journal's, one of the more successful, only lets you see the first paragraph online). Will the drug pusher approach work out for The New York Times? The CEO seems to be certain that this blogger (and Slashdot) friendly paywall is the correct option and will keep The New York Times as a 'part of the conversation' online when news is rapidly circulating." I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, yesterday I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason. So we'll see how it pans out.

Comments

Why the paywall won't work

[Pojut]

There are already so many different places to get news from with such a variety of bias from all sides (and, on rare occasion, from no side), I see no reason to actually pay for news online. Sure, some of the bigger sites will get attention, but with smaller companies taking over the news on the Internet (Huffington Post, Drudge Report, etc), I have a feeling that pay-for news will eventually become quite scarce.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[betterunixthanunix]

Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times. The goal is not for everyone to pay, and they could not care less about whether people have access to their newspaper. They just want to make money, and they probably will. There are enough universities out there willing to pay enormous subscription fees.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[eugene ts wong]

That's interesting. If universities pay researchers, then maybe paying journalists is a great idea. I personally wish that we could get away from that, but it would be something that I would explore.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[nomad-9]

Newspapers make the bulk of their money from selling ad space, not with subscription fees.

If the same news are available elsewhere for free, then subscription fees are useless. If that was not the case, if the NYT had worthwhile content unavailable anywhere else that would make readers keep coming back, then yes, this could work. I don't see that being the case, IMO.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[tompaulco]

I agree. The only way news sites will be able to make money is if they adopt the cell phone model, where the user is not really aware that what they are doing is costing them money until it is far too late.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

However, journalists do not research their stories much less the facts contained within those stories. Until journalists return to, well journalism, I see no reason in holding them in the same regard as real researchers.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[John Hasler]

> ...and, on rare occasion, from no side....

In other words, biased to your "side".

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind paying a small amount to read an article, but the newspapers and I have a rather large discrepancy as to what they feel the info is worth. The same thing with "E-books" when I was a kid I paid 35 to 50 cents for a {PAPER} book NEW. Most of that was the cost of the paper. Since PAPER has gone up in price a lot, I might be willing to pay $8 for a NEW paperback novel TODAY, but even paperbacks are being priced above this by ever greedy publishers so I buy USED books more and more. Now if that is the price I am willing to pay for PAPER versions, then I feel that e-books, which are nearly pure profit for the publisher, are way overpriced. I think $3-5 is a reasonable price for an E-Book . Of course I would pay more for a technical book, but I would still expect that an E-Book should be 30-50% of the cost of it's paper cousin TOPS. So I might be willing to pay for an online paper subscription, but only 30-50% of the paper version, FOR THE ENTIRE PAPER, and proportionately less, if I read only 1 article.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[sheriff_p]

Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)

-P

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Pojut]

No, there are some that really do their honest best to keep things non-biased. Our local news radio station, WTOP, tends to present things very factually, leaving all opinion out of their "news" reports, keeping it confined to clearly-labeled "opinion" pieces (which are posted from a variety of people.)

It's rare, but there are news services out there that really do just report the facts, not their version of the facts.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

For a simple technical reason, sites want to be accessible by google. Just set your user agent to googlebot and paywalls disappear.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[zach_the_lizard]

What does the NYT (or any large paper) offer me that I can't get straight from the source (AP) for free? They haven't been doing much real journalism in years, so I'm at a loss.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[bws111]

The AP is NOT the source, the newspapers are. AP is owned by the newpapers. AP gets it's stories from the member newpapers (they also have some of their own reporters). When there are no newspapers, there is no AP.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how being stupid is now seen as somebody else's fault nowadays.

"I'm too dumb to read and understand the terms of the service I signed up for, clearly somebody else is at fault."

Idiots get what they deserve.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Deep Esophagus]

I feel for the big newspapers, really I do. They spend a ton of money getting firsthand news (ignoring the wire services for the moment), spend another couple hundred kilos of money formatting it nicely for the web, and we want it all for free. They put ads up, we use ad blockers. They give up on all those reporters' salaries and just use wire services, and we complain that there's no local content. We (as consumers) need to give the content providers SOMETHING that justifies all the money they spend on the content, or it won't last and the only news sources left will be J. Random Blogger and his incendiary, ill-informed rants against one party or another. I don't know about you, but "It was in The Times" carries a lot more weight for me than "It was on Slashdot" or "It was on Drudge" or "It was on Goatse" or whatever.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[bws111]

Somehow that news station takes the experiences of billions of people over a day and condenses that down to a few minutes (or even hours) of 'news'. Deciding which stories are worth reporting, and what facts to present from those stories requires judgment, and judgment is influenced by bias.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

@zach_the_lizard the Associated Press puts the AP in crap.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Pojut]

When I say bias, I mean they don't approach things from a "Democrat" or "Republican" point of view, like say MSNBC or Fox. They simply present them as facts, and leave the interpretation up to the listener.

Yes, there is judgement used when deciding what to cover, but my point is that what they do cover is presented in an impartial fashion.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Pojut]

Very true! While more and more web-based news orgs are using their own reporters, researchers, and press folks (this seems to be especially true on gaming blogs), they still don't come even close to the effort, expense, and expertise shown by the larger news agencies.

For me, it's not that big news sources aren't worth the money...I just don't see a reason to pay them for the same information I can get for free (legally!)

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[MightyYar]

(Huffington Post, Drudge Report, etc)

Then we're all doomed. Those "news" sites are just aggregation blogs which do about as much fact-checking as Google News's automatic robot. Just last week Huff Post actually reposted the kind of trash you get in your in-box from your grandmother - that first week she has email, when she's still tying in ALL CAPS. There are now TWO correction updates, and they STILL don't have the facts right. Would it have killed them to at least run a check on Snopes? Does anyone really think that they "soak" food in ammonia?

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Woogiemonger]

(they also have some of their own reporters)

Doesn't this mean that without newspapers, there is an AP?

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[yelvington]

What does the NYT (or any large paper) offer me that I can't get straight from the source (AP) for free? They haven't been doing much real journalism in years, so I'm at a loss.

If you think that, it's because you don't actually read the New York Times.

I'm looking at the NYT homepage right now. There are three wire stories. Everything else is original work by one or more New York Times reporters.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[bws111]

No. The AP is owned by the newspapers. All of it's funding comes from the member newspapers. Yes, there are some 'AP' reporters who are not working for a specific paper, but they are still paid by the collective of the papers.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Americano]

Now if that is the price I am willing to pay for PAPER versions, then I feel that e-books, which are nearly pure profit for the publisher, are way overpriced. I think $3-5 is a reasonable price for an E-Book . Of course I would pay more for a technical book, but I would still expect that an E-Book should be 30-50% of the cost of it's paper cousin TOPS.

You realize that the cost or printing & distributing the paper book is a fairly small fraction of the cost of publishing it, right? Most of the cost of creating the book has nothing to do with the mechanics of putting ink on paper - proofing, layout, art, editing, author royalties - all of this is still a part of the process, regardless of the form the final product takes.

Looking at Barnes & Noble's web site, a quick scan of paperback books indicates that many of them are priced in the $12-$15 US range, versus $9.99 for an ebook version. The difference between an ebook and a paperback book is - of course - that the publisher doesn't incur printing, distribution, and warehousing costs, but that could very well be covered by the discount of $3-5 per copy. Why would you expect the price of an ebook to be so much lower than the cost of a paperback, given that printing, distribution, and warehousing are the only parts of the publication process that they eliminate (or have a chance to save significantly on - server infrastructure & distribution still costs them *something*, just much less than shipping bricks of paper around.)

I don't understand this argument that somehow because something is in digital form, it should "be almost free" - if you value the content, the value, and much of the cost, is *in the content* not in physical medium the content is distributed on/in. Why is $9 a vastly unreasonable price for an ebook, given all of the effort from numerous people that must go into producing that book, and where printing & distribution are some of the smallest parts of the cost?

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

....They put ads up, we use ad blockers...

And I suppose you wold put up with noisy, flashing ads that slowed down how quickly you could turn the page in a print edition?
They did it to themselves with their obnoxious ad designs.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[hairyfeet]

Well I'm not the AC above (I personally think ACs are the cancer killing /.) I'll be happy to interpret from my point of view. I was recently offer my local paper for free for 1 month and refused. "But why? We'll give it to you for free to see if you like it!" and I told them the same thing I'll tell you: A bunch of rehashed AP stories, the latest press release word for word from Local_Corp, and a list of who died and who is having a bake sale does NOT a paper make.

Like the *.A.As rather than get with the times (pun intended) and come up with new ideas and new ways of staying competitive papers by and large have been trying to stay in the 70s, where rehashed AP stories and the same old crap could let them make the $$$. but it ain't 1970 anymore, and I can get that same AP crap from a thousand places, and ALL fresher than the paper. Going across the south I can say nearly all the local papers that are dying NEED to die, as they do NO real investigative journalism, ask NO hard questions of politicians and civic leaders, and regurgitate the same crap everybody else says word for word.

So like I told the formerly perky but now depressed after talking to me paper pusher, There is a REASON why she was having to try to offer to give it away for a month trying to get people to take it, and that is the local paper simply isn't worth anything anymore. And while I can't speak for the whole USA sadly most of the places I went to you could substitute any paper for another and I doubt most would even notice. It is just the same shit, different day. Now why would I pay for that? Give me value, you get my money. don't? Then don't even bother asking, there are many more besides you I can go to. And just because it is "on the Internet!" doesn't make their shit any less smelly. I don't think I've seen anything at the NYT I couldn't have gotten somewhere else, and it isn't like we have a shortage of news sources nowadays.

Hell even the old folks that I have as customers make sure I set their browser to Yahoo.com so they can "read the paper" because to them that IS the paper now. Say what you want about the Yahoo.com portal being cluttered, but I swear more folks have that set as their home page by a large margin than any other site. Even my GF gets pissy if I don't have an easy button in FF so she can get to "Her Yahoo" when she is spending the weekend. I'd say the days of the NYT and other papers are over if they don't get with the times and find new ways to stay relevant.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have a link providing the exact break down of printing/distribution/warehousing costs? I had the same thought but I can't actually find anything on this, which now makes me wonder if the information is being suppressed for a specific reason (it would also explain why my local bookshop is pushing e-readers so hard, even though theoretically a successful e-reader would put them out of business).

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[delinear]

For now, maybe - but bots demonstrate specific behaviours that the average reader doesn't. It would be trivial to eliminate the majority of what looks like freeloading traffic with a technical solution, the only reason one isn't being employed already is that so few people care enough to trick their way around said paywalls. Besides, that kind of deceptive behaviour tends to get sites blacklisted in Google.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When there are no newspapers, there is no AP.

And nothing of value is lost.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[geekoid]

Online services also pay the AP.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Yer Mom]

"It was on Goatse"

"I only read it for the articles."

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Technician]

Most of the time, to get the rest of the story, I plug the free paragraph into Google. The search results most often has many complete copies. Google is your friend.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[delinear]

That ignores the fact that newspapers were already in decline before the internet became popular. This has nothing to do with people wanting something for nothing, because before the internet you had to pay for the alternatives or just go without, and people were making that choice even back then. To me this is about the failure of the press to deliver what people want. I don't know what that is, if I did I'd probably be incredibly rich. For me I'd like to see more in-depth journalism instead of a mindless regurgitation of unverified information, less bias and opinion (unless it's clearly an opinion piece), and I would love to see sources cited so I can follow up stories that interest me, or clearly see how lazy the journalist has been in just copying verbatim from another newspaper.

I'd like to see less padding of articles to try and flood the noise to signal ratio so they can claw back more ad revenue per column inch - if you only have ten pages of news, sell me a ten page newspaper, not a 50 page "hunt the facts" game in a newspaper format. And when you screw up, have the honesty to admit it, and I don't mean burying it away on page 37 - if you've given me misinformation by accident in the past, I'd like to see that misinformation corrected, I'd rather know I was getting the truth rather than live in some ignorant bubble where I imagine my news source is somehow infallible (nobody would ever believe that anyway).

Greed started the decline in the newspaper industry, when publishers realised they could pad out their stories by 100% and attract more ad revenue while barely increasing their costs. Lazy, sloppy journalism then picked up where greed left off to leave newspapers in the sorry state they were in back in the 90's. Then along came an alternative that had the magic ingredient of being incredibly cheap/free and, since there was no value proposition in the real world news sources, they just couldn't compete. Start offering quality, it'll hurt in the short run until people come to trust the newspapers again, sure, but the only way you can beat free is to offer something people are happy to pay for.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[mlk]

I've never used a Ad Blocker (the horror I know), but I've rarely had a obnoxious ad design on a "good" news source.

Lots of shitty sources of "news" have them, but I rarely view shitty news sources, as they are... shitty.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[stephanruby]

Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times. The goal is not for everyone to pay, and they could not care less about whether people have access to their newspaper.

Hopefully, Slashdot and bloggers, will take a page from Google, and stop linking to sporadically inaccessible sites. The problem is not so much with the New York Times (by now, most of us do recognize the New York Times link as an inaccessible site). For me, the problem becomes the other lesser known news sites (that are trying to follow in the New York Times foot steps). Clicking on a link, and then having to click the back button because I can't read the content anymore, just drives me nuts.

And I do hope that the Slashdot summarizes and the blogs that I read start implementing some kind of automatic filter that weeds out the links that are no longer valid (and/or that have content only the first time you click on it, but not the second time). Eventually, it's not just the sites that have paywalls that will lose traffic, but it's also the sites that link to them that will lose traffic as well.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[MysteriousPreacher]

I don't disable all adverts, but I do disable flash content. It got silly to be playing WoW and wondering why my fps had dropped, only to find that a web page I'd left open in the background had some flash junk that was eating in to my CPU time. Some Flash content is pretty well behaved, i.e. isn't in some crazy loop, but the more frenetic ones eat up those cycles.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[eugene ts wong]

Yes, I understand, and mostly agree. So, if we hold them accountable, just as we hold other researchers accountable, then we might have a positive outcome.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[AliasMarlowe]

There are already so many different places to get news from with such a variety of bias from all sides (and, on rare occasion, from no side), I see no reason to actually pay for news online.

The only site where I cross a paywall is the one where I subscribe to the physical news magazine, and thus don't have to pay extra (The Economist). Most of its articles are free online, anyway, and magazine subscribers just get a bit more than non-subscribers. I pay for the magazine because I enjoy reading their intelligent and well-written analyses. Usually, I read it almost cover to cover (skipping some ads), since it's utterly free from horoscopes, sports, celebrity gossip, self-help advice, etc.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[flink]

Does anyone really think that they "soak" food in ammonia?

I don't see why not. Black canned olives are artificially ripened using lye, so sterilizing meat with ammonia doesn't sound too far fetched. Not saying the story is correct, but it doesn't seem too ridiculous at face value.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Attila Dimedici]

Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)

-P

So, you want some poor quality journalism to go with the high quality journalism you get from The Economist? I am baffled by people who think the NYT is a good source of news. In the early 30s, they were printing stories denying the Soviet created famine in the Ukraine (stories they won a Pulitzer Prize for). During WWII, they denied/downplayed the Holocaust. More recently, one of their star reporters was discovered to file "on location" stories from his apartment in NY. There are more cases of such journalistic malfeasance by the NYT that covers most of its history.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[metrix007]

this isn't twitter, fool.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[spitzak]

Soaking food in ammonia is illegal.

What they do is add a preservative that has a word similar to "ammonia" in it's chemical name and this got mangled (either on purpose or accident) into the post.

I agree with the grandparent that Huff Post has so far failed to correct the "ammonia" comment. However the grandparent has also contributed his own spin: read his article and see if he is not implying that the *picture* is wrong.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Americano]

I'm basing this off of numbers available from self-publishing / publish-on-demand services, and conversations with a girl I dated for a while who worked as an editor for a fairly large publishing company that does much of its business in paperbacks.

Most of the small offset printing services seem to run somewhere around $3/unit for runs of ~2000 units; Price-per-unit declines as the volume of the run goes up, and it's trivially obvious that a large publishing company will have high-volume arrangements with printers, further reducing their costs.

Many of these mass-market paperbacks sell for $10-15, making the physical printing costs approach ~10-20% of the total unit cost (actual numbers could even be lower for some books & publishing companies). And yet there's this assumption that eliminating printing from the process, but nothing else, should reduce the price of the book by 50-75%.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[careysub]

Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)

-P

So, you want some poor quality journalism to go with the high quality journalism you get from The Economist? I am baffled by people who think the NYT is a good source of news. In the early 30s, they were printing stories denying the Soviet created famine in the Ukraine (stories they won a Pulitzer Prize for). During WWII, they denied/downplayed the Holocaust. More recently, one of their star reporters was discovered to file "on location" stories from his apartment in NY. There are more cases of such journalistic malfeasance by the NYT that covers most of its history.

Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.

I admit that helping to push the U.S. into a needless war that has killed 4420 Americans, crippled 32,000 and committed the U.S. to a $2-3 trillion dollar war debt is a serious black mark on its record.

I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Dthief]

I only read it for the testicles

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[QRDeNameland]

Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times.

I wouldn't be so sure. They already tried to implement a limited pay wall called "Time Select" in 2005 and was discontinued after two years. The most prominent thing that was charged for was their Op-Ed columnists (Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, et al.), and guess what, they all complained bitterly about it because it greatly decreased their readership and influence. In Friedman's words, "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience." However, the main reason for its failure seemed to be a recognition that subscription fees did not make up for the loss of ad revenue from decreased traffic.

Why they think a pay wall will work any better now is beyond me. My best guess is that they figure with more people using mobile devices and e-readers that more people will be willing to pay, but from what they are describing, I'd think they'd get an even bigger drop off in traffic from the new pay wall. Time(s) will tell.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[QRDeNameland]

Funny, you dredge up stuff from the 70-80 years ago, plus a 7-year-old minor fraud perpetrated on the paper by an employee (and that the paper itself detected and blew the whistle on), but omit the most serious failure in reporting by the Times in the last half-century: Judith Miller's trumpeting of the cooked and clearly defective intelligence claims of the Bush Administration about Iraq's supposed WMDs.

Just as bad, IMHO, was the decision to delay for a year their reporting on Bush's eavesdropping program that was submitted prior to the 2004 election.

I think there is evidence that it has learned its lesson and will not be lap dog for right-wing craziness in the future. So maybe you should give the NYT a second chance.

Just curious, what evidence would that be?

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[ediron2]

Um, you contradict yourself a bit there. On those occasions where one of the AP's 'own reporters' writes a story, the AP *is* the source. This is akin to war or political-campaign news stories relying on a 'pool' reporter. On short-term work (chilean miners), a nearby journo or freelancer is often put on contract for the duration.

As for GP, there are fewer papers and news agencies assigning reporters and sportswriters and etc elsewhere. Sharing / pooling writers and photographers is cheaper. The NYT, Reuters, news mags, etc still put reporters on assignment, at which point THEY ARE the source. While NYT's reporter count is way down, they're still their own primary sources on a LOT of content.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

Get back to me when there are zero wire services; then I might bite. BTW, why are you shilling for the NYT? Maybe you want to declare an interest...?

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Reziac]

Interesting... was UPI the same sort of deal? (I don't know if it's even still around; it was our college radio station's newsfeed, because it was cheaper than AP.)

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[heptapod]

Please don't compare the New York Times with the Huffington Post or Drudge.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[bws111]

UPI is still around, and it is not the same thing. UPI is a privately owned for-profit company which licenses it's content to newspapers, etc.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[MightyYar]

I didn't mean to imply that the picture was wrong - I was trying to target the text...

However, I will say that since they did absolutely no fact-checking whatsoever, I have no confidence that the picture is correct, either. In either case, I eat lots of yucky-looking things that are very delicious so I'm not sure why the picture is even relevant. Indian food in particular, while one of my favorite things to eat, looks like something the cat barfed up.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[MightyYar]

Black canned olives are artificially ripened using lye, so sterilizing meat with ammonia doesn't sound too far fetched.

I'm not sure that I follow. These are completely different substances. Lye is used to cure many things, not just olives.

Anyway, this just emphasizes why it is irresponsible not to check facts - even those which sound plausible. If you were editing the story and feeling a bit lazy, you might not have checked on the "soaked in ammonia" claim.

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[Reziac]

Ah, okay, thanks. Our radio station went with UPI because it was some tiny fraction of what AP charged for the same level of news feed, and if I recall right, UPI threw in use of the teletype machine for free. As you can tell this was a long time ago. :)

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[theaceoffire]

*cough**cough**cough*

Re:Why the paywall won't work

[nedwidek]

Ah, no. The lye is used to cure them. Olives are naturally bitter and need to be cured or fermented first. For California olives, they are picked full size, but green. They are soaked in lye to remove the phenolics and other compounds that make them bitter. Black olives are obtained by aerating the solution and oxidizing the olives. When they don't use aeration, it is ferrous sulfate or ferrous gluconate. The olives are soaked in clean water a few times to remove the lye and other chemicals used in the process.

Pay For The Internet?

[WrongSizeGlass]

What, people want us to pay to access some stuff on the internet? What's next, /. offering subscriptions?

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm, actually, yeah.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

~ Whoosh ~

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[betterunixthanunix]

Remember back when the we had the World Wide Web, that ingenious system where any document could have a hyperlink to any other document? The problem with paywalls is that they kill that system -- your links suddenly become blocked with demands for money.

Not that anyone cares about the spirit of openness and cooperation. These paywalls won't fail; I believe that they will be a great success, insofar as they will make lots of money for the websites that operate them. Most people will not pay, but enough will.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[somersault]

And open websites will make even more money via advertising..

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[e065c8515d206cb0e190]

Here comes the myth. "Advertising will pay for it". Why is Zuckerberg trying so hard to monetize Facebook? Because advertising doesn't pay. This year (yes, 2010) is the first year Youtube is expected to turn a positive result (meaning that Google has yet a long way to make that investment profitable if you count since 2005).

The bottom line is you can't expect advertising to be a miracle solution. Everyone hates ads. A lot of people block them. The click rates are low. And yet people want content for free. Am I missing something here?

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[zach_the_lizard]

Zuckerberg is a billionaire. If advertising doesn't pay, I want to know what does pay.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[SudoGhost]

thatwasthejoke.jpg

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[somersault]

I didn't know Google invested in Facebook? Aren't they competitors via Orkut?

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[larry bagina]

He's not a billionaire because of advertising, he's a "billionaire" (on paper) because of his facebook stock (which isn't traded on the open market so the valuation is arbitrary and based, more so than usual, on hype). So starting a high growth company pays.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Error 402
Give me moar money!

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but if I subscribe do I still have to see ads? Sure you might have a few places where the answer is "No", but most of the time it's "Yes", (Cable TV, Hulu, even some Satellite radio channels, etc.).

This is why I don't really care if ads can pay for it or not. I hate ads. I might pay for some stuff if I can see it without ads, most of the time this is not possible. So you may have a point, ads sometimes don't pay for everything, but the answer to that is it's irrelavant to me and a lot of other folks. If there are ads, we'll block them, if you take the site down, oh well. If you ask for subs and remove the ads in exchange we'll consider it.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Am I missing something here?

The fact that the intrinsic worth of content has gone down to almost zero.

Sure, you can argue about how hard people have to work to produce content, etc, etc. But sooner or later the whole world is going to have to wake up to the fact that the complete works of William Shakespeare take up less than 2MB, and this is only going to get worse. Sooner or later, a complete list of all Paramount pictures will fit in a single portable hard drive and will be transmittable over a home internet connection in less than a day. It doesn't matter what legal, ethical, commerical or social system you put in place against this. Eventually, your system will buckle under the sheer weight of what the new digital reality has done to the distribution of content.

This isn't an argument for or against piracy or bloggers freeloading off news. It's an argument for why content such as news is increasingly becoming something people don't see it worth paying for. And I understand the paradox here: it now costs more to make content--even something as cheap as news--than it does to distribute it to the entire world.

Advertising can pay for the distribution no problem, but there is probably no existing commercial model left which can pay for the content. If you can't profit on something that you're distributing to the entire world, the game is up.

Society has spoken; it's not willing to pay for commercial news, either directly or through advertising. We could switch to a subsidized or public service model of news, or have no news at all. But commercial news services are about to become increasingly scant (not that they weren't becoming so anyway). People are not going to pay for a newspaper that has less data than one of their friends facebook pictures. People might not like to hear this, but this is where the almost zero cost of data has taken us.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google makes billion from advertising. A lot of people on /. block them, not a lot of people in general.

The click rates for ads in physical media is exactly 0. Kind of a false way to determine if advertising works.

Ads are fine, ads where the advertiser demands instant feed back are not.

Zuckerberg is trying hard to make a gazillion dollars immediately.
In 09 we made over 500 million dollars.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[tepples]

The click rates for ads in physical media is exactly 0.

Get a separate toll-free telephone number for each publication in which you advertise, and you can calculate relative click rates based on which number gets more calls.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Cheech Wizard]

Here comes the myth. "Advertising will pay for it".

Advertising paid (and pays) for radio, for TV (OTA Free TV may be on the way out, but that's only because of limited broadcast range and the success of cable and satellite 'services'), for magazines and pays for lots of other things things. It's no myth. I have web sites online and have since 1996. They all pay for themselves through advertising alone and I do quite well, thank you. There are many ways to monetize a business in addition to advertising, as well. For musicians it may be concerts, as an example of how free music can work for a musician or band.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[tepples]

it now costs more to make content--even something as cheap as news--than it does to distribute it to the entire world.

Except in media where there still exist incumbent gatekeeper companies with digital imprimatur power. The market for arcade-style video games, for example, is still controlled by the game console makers.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[guruevi]

5 year for a business (much less a dotcom) to turn profitable is not very long. There are many companies that have been operating on a (seemingly) loss for decades. Look at some of the movie and music businesses, they seem to be making a loss at every movie they make. As long as you can woo investors (like some of those free-energy companies) you will stay in business. Zuckerberg is trying to monetize Facebook because he wants to get stinkin' rich and he probably feels he is 'finished' with it. Dotcoms are notable for some yuppie starting it up, losing interest as soon as it breaks even and then selling it to a venture capitalist whom tries to make even more money out of it (those investors will not invest in something that is going to be a giant loss). As soon as those corporates get their fingers in it however, they try to forcibly monetize it (being more interested in quarterly results and quick profits) which drains the company from it's life force and leaves a 'failed' business.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Rayonic]

The click rates are low.

I'm amazed that there's still such a focus on click rates. Tell me, how many clicks do TV ads get? Or newspaper and radio ads? Ads need to look interesting and deliver their message, that's it. Clicks are just a bonus. They only happen if you can entice people to learn more AND it looks at least a little trustworthy (i.e. not adspam).

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[betterunixthanunix]

The bottom line is you can't expect advertising to be a miracle solution. Everyone hates ads. A lot of people block them. The click rates are low. And yet people want content for free. Am I missing something here?

Why do ads work so well for TV and radio? The way I see, the problem was not advertisements on websites; the problem was that greedy advertisers noticed that computers could create intrusive, invasive, and highly annoying advertisements -- basically, what they had been hoping for all along, since they believed it would give them an edge over their competitors (who, of course, were doing exactly the same thing; talk about the prisoner's dilemma).

Look at Google, and how much money they made from simple, unintrusive, text only advertisements. People did not start blocking ads because they wanted to avoid Google-style advertising. Ads are blocked because of advertisements that are drawn on top of the web page we actually wanted, and because of Flash (and earlier, Java) ads that burn through CPU cycles trying to get our attention.

Really, if people want to make money advertising on the web, the very concept of web advertisements needs to be rethought. Maybe instead of focusing on clicks, we should treat web advertising the way we currently treat advertisements in printed newspapers: a way to promote the product itself, rather than a way to try to get people to visit some other website. Of course, that will first require advertisers to regain the public's trust that allowing an advertisement won't prevent us from reading what we wanted to read.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Reziac]

I'd hazard that one reason people are unwilling to pay for news content is that most of it is essentially eyeball-collecting, and functionally news-free.

I'm reminded of the last interview I saw with some local earthquake expert, I forget her name but the TV news reporter was trying to goad her into making a doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world statement, and was clearly disappointed that her reply was a dispassionate "no, just the facts, this happens all the time" type thing, of absolute no use for scare-mongering. But a good example of how typical "news content" now is all about collecting terrified eyeballs that can't look away [thus are sellable to advertisers] lest some new horror emerge, and not about news at all.

I'd suggest that's also the dividing line for whether we the readers would perceive news content as worth paying for.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure I'm one of the vast, vast, vast minority, but I have an open, ad-free website. It may just be a webcomic, but still... I hate seeing advertising, and thus don't subject my readers to any. I don't use a paywall, since I know that nobody would pay it.

I make the website because I WANT to make the website. It is worth it to me to pay the money for it, as opposed to receive income from it.

Sadly, I wish more websites existed because the author actually makes it because they want to, not because they want money.

Note: Only posting anon because I'm at work and can't log in. Username Kabuthunk. The webcomic is Planet Zebeth for those curious.

Re:Pay For The Internet?

[somersault]

I would do things the same way, but I'm talking about websites where people actually work at/for the website. I suppose they could make money by having a store rather than being ad supported, but I don't grudge sites like that ads if it makes them some money. I block them anyway!

Mod parent funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I understand how these people like NYT work. It appears to be a bug or something, but they are just throwing up the smokescreen. Goatse is my source of news, however, and we NEVER have ads or this junk going on. Just 100% complete viewage with no strings attached.

Yeah me too. So goatse is news for you? Welcome to 2000.

And i am sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

People STILL won't pay for news they can go get from somewhere else for free.

If its any kind of 'news'. It's going to be covered in more than the NYT.

Re:And i am sure.

[Alien1024]

They hope to make money not just from the news, but also from the editorial, analysis and opinion pieces.

Re:And i am sure.

[JWSmythe]

They've been working on that one. If you run a blurb of NYT stuff, they'll get pissy. Then they'll go after you, your money, search engines, and even the search engine caches. I've known people who have cited a single sentence fragment, and received nasty-grams.

    These are nasty-gram someone I know received, via Google Adsense. There have been several over quite a few years. In these cases, compliance on their part happened within about 2 hours. Adsense left them without any ad revenue for weeks. Neither NYT nor Attributor commented that the result was to their satisfaction, nor were they able to even begin negotiations for the requested "license". Oh, and these complaints on behalf of the NYT were frequently regarding other unrelated (to the best of anyone's knowledge) publications.

    They aren't about openness and inducing conversation about current topics. But please, come in, pay us, and be open. What if the readers don't trust the NYT to know who they are, so they can't leave open comments, because they are afraid of the repercussions?

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to you as a representative of The New York Times.

We have included below a list of URLs on your website that contain copies of The New York Times copyright protected articles.

If you wish to republish the articles then you need to purchase a license to do so. We do not believe that you have a formal agreement or license in place with The New York Times to republish The New York Times articles. If you believe you already have a formal agreement to reproduce The New York Times material or have any other questions, please reply via email to fairshare@attributor.com.

Thank you for your cooperation,

Attributor Corporation, an authorized agent for The New York Times

[SNIP]

... ...

fairshare@attributor.com

Dear Sir/Madam,

I certify under penalty of perjury, that I am an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the intellectual property rights and that the information contained in this notice is accurate.

I have a good faith belief that the page or material listed below is not authorized by law for use by the individual(s) associated with the identified page listed below or their agents and therefore infringes the copyright owner's rights.

THE INFRINGING PAGE/MATERIAL IDENTIFIED BELOW IS INDEXED AND PRESENT IN YOUR SEARCH ENGINE AND
I HEREBY DEMAND THAT YOU ACT EXPEDITIOUSLY TO REMOVE THE PAGE FROM YOUR INDEX AND ALL CACHED
OR ARCHIVED COPIES OF THE PAGE FROM YOUR SERVERS.

This notice is sent pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the European Union's Directive on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society (2001/29/EC), and/or other laws and regulations relevant in European Union member states or other jurisdictions.

Note

My contact information is as follows:

Organization name: Attributor Corporation as agent for The New York Times
Email: fairshare@attributor.com
Phone: 650.306.9474
Mailing address:
1775 Woodside Road, Suite 100
Redwood City, CA 94061

INFRINGING
YOUR INDEX IN CONSIDERATION OF THE ABOVE:
[SNIP]

Re:And i am sure.

[countertrolling]

If its any kind of 'news'. It's going to be covered in more than the NYT.

Yeah, everybody else will just grab the AP wire

Re:And i am sure.

[Kijori]

More and more newspapers are moving to paywall model, though. With the Conservatives keen to scale back the BBC's free online presence BBC News may well become either much more limited or only available to UK licence-payers. If things continue at this rate then every reputable news source will soon be restricting its online content. If that comes to pass then I think people will pay.

Seems not to like Corporate networks or something

[IBBoard]

I've been asked to login after what was (I think) my first click of the day, so I think it might not like corporate networks that proxy lots of people through a very small number of IP addresses!

I'm sure there are sites out there to help with "free account required" login pages, but what's the betting that they start slowly creeping the payments in and creeping the freebies down?

Automatic back button

[nicolas.kassis]

When I see a news site requiring registration or subscription I just hit the back button. I don't think I've ever subscribe to any news site. There is just no point considering there will always be open news site (Always,Murdoch and al. can't do anything about this). If the first click is free then it might entice me to check out the site for more news and potentially sign up. It would need to be high quality news site to get me to sign up. NYT is probably one of about 5 newspapers that can even attempt such a model. My local paper became subscription only online. I use to check the site out every day. I haven't check it since the change.

If You Want an Example

[eldavojohn]

I submitted a story a few days ago. Click the link once, then close the page. Then click the link again. You should get a paywall. I was a bit confused by the comment that iamhassi posted on it until I tried to visit the page again. It's happened before but now their strategy is clear and verified. Oddly enough when Soulskill retooled it and pushed it out, the new link is immune to this.

The Slash code seems to adjust my links sometimes and I've told CmdrTaco about this but it's really evident on nytimes.com articles.

Re:If You Want an Example

[drinkypoo]

Perhaps Slashdot (or its parent) has an agreement with NYT. I know that when I get to a paywall, I immediately lose interest in an article; Someone out there must be paying for news, I guess, but I'm not going to be one of them.

Re:If You Want an Example

[houghi]

Just tried it and indeed the second time it blocks. Removed all cookies and the site worked again, so it seems that a workaround is to figure out what cookies does this and then delete it.

I was to lazy to do that.

Re:If You Want an Example

[Captain Spam]

I submitted a story a few days ago. Click the link once, then close the page. Then click the link again. You should get a paywall.

Hi. Look at my submission. Now click the link. Now back to the submission. Now BACK to the link. Sadly, you should get a paywall. But if your link didn't go to a corporate dinosaur's website, it wouldn't smell like a paywall. Scroll up. Now back down. Where are you? You're on Slashdot. What's in your hand? Back up to me. I have it. It's a mouse, clicking on those links you like to see. Now look at me. The mouse is now diamonds. Anything is possible when you use the power of the world wide web to freely distribute information regardless of payment or network. I'm on a computer.

Re:If You Want an Example

[countertrolling]

Deleting them works for me too. Just delete everything from NYT. But don't block them. The registration form will pop up with a "cookie error".

Re:If You Want an Example

[Anonymous Coward]

5555

Re:If You Want an Example

[hairyfeet]

An easy way to do this if you are on FF is to use Cookie Culler and simply tell it not to save any NYT cookies. Then every time the browser is closed any NYT cookies are cleared, or there is a simple button in CC that lets you clear them whenever. Whoever invented the FF extension framework really needs to be given a raise and a new car, as that thing is the best damned lock in tool I've ever seen! There ain't no way in hell I'm switching to another browser and give up my extensions. Thanks FF extension dude!

Re:If You Want an Example

[Anonymous Coward]

AC for mod preservation but you owe me a keyboard...

"miserable failure"?

[abigsmurf]

Murdoch's paywall was hardly a miserable failure. The subscriber figures they gave initially did indicate a massive drop in reader numbers but when you compare the amount each user is worth as an ad viewer, compared to how much they're worth as a subscriber, at worst they only had a slight drop in revenue (I did the figures in that other story, CBA to work through them again), at best they had a slight rise in revenue. It does at least hint that a paywall solution is a lot more viable than lots of people thought.

And that was based off of their initial subscriber figures, if they've experienced a reasonable amount of subscriber growth, they would be making more money than with the ad supported site. Would be interested in knowing if their figures have gone up or down.

Re:"miserable failure"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it fails in any way, IMHO, it's that content never turns free. I've heard Murdock said of his news empire that they're like a bakery, only they give away all the fresh stuff (on the Internet), and charge (in print) for the stale stuff. I am wondering if they'll ever let the pay-for stuff go for free (eg. publish time + 1 month or something).

For me at least, I'm not going to even sign up for it without seeing the product. If I'm honest, I'm unlikely to subscribe, as they probably turn out one article per quarter I really care about. Right now, I just miss out on it, and unless they can find a way to hook me in, they'll miss out on my money at the same time.

What the NY times is trying to do is getting towards where I'd like them to go. If they gave me accumulating free credit, then that one article per quarter would probably be free, even on day of publication. However, if I got interested in one of the links, then I'd be asked to pay - well, at least I then get engaged and have to decide if I want to pay (or subscribe). Right now, I'm just locked out entirely (unless I join a free trial programme, I guess).

If you're going to go down the pay-wall route, then this is a good step forward. Of course, if pay-walls work out at all is another matter, but that's one for the market to decide.

Porn mode

[spectrokid]

If I surf in porn mode, can NYT see I've been there before?

Re:Porn mode

[CarpetShark]

"Porn mode" protects you from your wife, not from the internet. Or your boss.

Re:Porn mode

[tepples]

If I surf in porn mode, can NYT see I've been there before?

Which web browser's porn mode are you using? Does it handle Adobe Flash Player LSOs in addition to its own cookies, cache, and history? And have you tested it with the evercookie demo?

Re:Porn mode

[wjousts]

Actually, it's tiresome, but it does work (in Firefox at least). Turn on porn mode, go to NY Times site (example, link in this submission. Leave the page, come back - paywall. Quit porn mode, turn it back on again, go back to the same NY Times page - no paywall. So it'll work for your first visit to NY times, but then you have to turn it off and back on again for the next visit.

Re:Porn mode

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

And nothing will protect any of them from the server logs.

Re:Porn mode

[delinear]

It sounds like this is cookie based but that the site checks initially that it can write a cookie, to get around people just disabling cookies. I'm thinking a JavaScript scriptlet could easily get around this, set a check on the page's unload event that deletes any cookies pertaining to the current domain - it would be pretty easy to get this working as a Firefox add-on, if anyone is really that keen to see over the paywall.

Re:Porn mode

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, just tested it in Iron (basically chrome) and each new incognito session allows a new hit to NYT.

Won't work...

[Haedrian]

Too much free competition. They can give out as many 'free looks' as much as they want - but this is the internet, and all it takes for me to look somewhere else is a bit of typing and the enter key.

It'll mean people will visit once, then leave.

Advertisements

[kellyb9]

You'd think with how much their actual distribution is probably suffering they'd decide to pick up a new distribution model instead of using one from the late 90's. I'm sure they're probably (or at least should be) cleaning up on advertisements.

Re:Advertisements

[gman003]

Your argument's flaw is in assuming that Big Media *can* tell that it isn't the 90s. Paywalls, poor comment systems... I half-expect to see a fresh stab at walled gardens sometime soon.

Re:Advertisements

[bsDaemon]

I have a free NYTimes.com account, but also run ABP, so I never see the ads. I also don't actually buy newspapers in print. I guess I'm a leach, but I suspect I'm not in the minority.

Re:Advertisements

[mcgrew]

Greed knows no bounds. When you buy a newspaper, your dollar pays for the paper and ink, ads pay for the content. Then the newspaper owners thought "gee, we can make a killing now and charge and advertise without having the expense of actually printing.

It's not just the newspapers either, look at the music industry. I can't for the life of me figure out why people will pay a dollar for a song download when you used to get two songs on a 45 for a buck, and it had to be manufactured. Worse, three dollars for a ring tone. A download shouldn't cost any more than a dime or two. If I want RIAA music I'll sample it from the radio.

Re:Advertisements

[Anonymous Coward]

I also have a free account with NYT. Until now, I had no idea I was missing anything. So what do you get if you pay?

What about the way Ars Technica runs its site? Can't read full articles unless you accept the ads, unless you pay for a subscription. Ars IS worth it to me, so I put up with the ads. At least some of them are interesting.

Not a single Murdoch publication is worth it to me, though, including his dishearteningly discredited WSJ. (derail: Has anyone else noticed how increasingly sensationalist the "teaser" ledes have become for WSJ online stories? It's like Murdoch is trying to gain subscribers by turning it into a business-oriented Weekly World News. Don't be surprised if Jon Stewart's alien baby appears on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.)

Re:Advertisements

[delinear]

An ad has to be pretty intrusive for me to even notice it anymore, so I'm generally happy to browse with ads enabled - I don't object to people making money from their websites, and they're providing me a service effectively free. I've yet to come across any news site that I would miss if I couldn't read it, though, which is why I'm not interested in paying for such content (not to mention I rarely read one site end to end, I'll dip in and out for the odd article so I don't want to pay for the whole thing - if there was a way to pay a few pennies per article I might consider that). I guess the BBC is the only news site I do read on a frequent basis, and I already pay for that - if any other news site wants me to pay real money they'd better figure out a way of either allowing me to pay per article or they'd need to generally raise the quality of most of their articles to such a point that they become my "go to" source for news. Right now I don't see any of them trying to raise quality, they're too busy moaning about the competition.

No local news- who cares?

[Maxo-Texas]

Okay, I'm overstating this a bit.. but why on earth do I care about a half page article about a toxic mud spill in another country? And no news on my local city or state in a recent paper. All wire articles.

All papers have become the same two or three wire services. I want my paper looking into the local police, fire, politicians for corruption. Local crime- who cares about a random murder in another state that they use for filler.
It just makes the world look uglier when the crime rate is actually down locally.

With internet searching, ads and reviews, I don't use the yellow pages or the newspaper to find vendors any more.
I do like the comics still.. but not that much. And new web comics like Questionable Content, Curvy, Looking for Group, and the steampunk girl (name escapes me).

Re:No local news- who cares?

[wjousts]

Yeah, really. How can anything outside the few square miles I live possibly have any effect on me? Ideally, I want a newspaper that only covers the events in my house. I'm going to have my dog be my crack investigative reporter looking into my wife's cutting corners when it comes to making my dinner. My cat covers sports.

Re:No local news- who cares?

[Maxo-Texas]

As I said, I overstated it a bit.

But does a murder in Kansas matter to you enough to pay $1 a day to be informed about it?

National and International news that matters should be in the news.

ACTA has never been mentioned once by my local paper nor have any other treaties.
Not once has my paper ever examined in depth a single bill by congress or a single bill by the state government.
We don't even hear about city and state tax increases until it's too late.

I guess what I mean is- I don't care about inconsequential flashy news that's not from my area.

I want to know about steven harper (never mentioned once), blair (never analyzed- just a "blair did this"), etc.

Those kind of things used to be in the paper- real news, written by real people.

Re:No local news- who cares?

[Maxo-Texas]

Odd. Zero with no downmod type?

And for heaven's sake why?

Other news sources

[Xanlexian]

This is why I don't use NYT for a news source. There's plenty of others out there.

Re:Other news sources

[geekoid]

You didn't use them because you new eventually they would paywall? bullshit.

A concise argument for click free paywalls

[Anonymous Coward]

Please register to read this comment.

Re:Why I like the NY Times

[somersault]

What the hell has the quality of a city's sports team or other nebulous measure of quality got to do with whether or not you want to read a newspaper from that city? Presumably there are many crappy newspapers in NY too.

I just don't read "normal news" newspapers, so I couldn't really care less whether they want to charge or not.. if every news site started charging I don't know what I'd do, since sites like slashdot link to several news sites a day.. though in Slashdot's case the real worth is often in the actual comments rather than the stories.

Content is always available elsewhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Twice in the past year or so, I hit a paywall to a major publication article. All I did was copy and past the first sentence (via Google News) into Google, and found ample other sites with the same article, w/o a paywall. The Times, WSJ, and other pubs feed a jillion other publications, and one of them is always free w/o a paywall. Some blog or forum post will always copy and paste the whole article somewhere too.

If an article is not available elsewhere, then it likely wasn't worth reading anyway.

WSJ is so easy to work around its funny

[Shivetya]

I take the title of the shortened article, paste it into Google, and usually I find a version in the first two entries that allows me to read the entire article. It must be a barrier to the lazy.

Re:Goatse

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to the goatse site you suggested, but I couldn't find any news there. All I could see was a photo of a naked man stretching his anus open.

I quit following NYT links years ago.

[John Hasler]

I tried to register once but it went haywire somehow. I didn't care enough to try again. I just ignore them.

NY Times no click zone

[pyalot]

I won't create an account with any of the gazillion of news sites out there just to read what they feel compelled to vomit on the internet. Since I'm of late only seeing the NY times registerwall whenever I click one of their links, I simply stopped clicking any link going to the NY Times. For my intends and purposes, the NY times is dead online. In fact, if I get around to, I'll put links to it on my spamfilter so I won't see them and accidentially click it.

Too little, too late

[digitaldc]

NYTimes should ditch the paywall for more ads, it is the only way to make money unless you give them something truly useful and unique for a subscription.
People can just use www.bugmenot.com to get around logins.

Rejection

[Anonymous Coward]

"I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, *yesterday* I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason. So we'll see how it pans out."

I would as a matter of policy reject any and all articles linking to paywall sites, including the NYT and WSJ.

As a side note, I would love to see what their conversion rate to paying customers is. Bet it's less than 0.01%

A hyperlink is a citation

[tepples]

Remember back when the we had the World Wide Web, that ingenious system where any document could have a hyperlink to any other document? The problem with paywalls is that they kill that system -- your links suddenly become blocked with demands for money.

A hyperlink is no more than a citation backed by a best-effort automated retrieval system. Documents can cite documents on the web with <a> elements. Before that, documents could cite documents on paper with footnotes. Just because the retrieval is automated doesn't mean it has to be without payment.

Re:A hyperlink is a citation

[0123456]

A hyperlink is no more than a citation backed by a best-effort automated retrieval system. Documents can cite documents on the web with <a> elements. Before that, documents could cite documents on paper with footnotes. Just because the retrieval is automated doesn't mean it has to be without payment.

Linking to pay sites pisses off readers and the vast majority of web sites either stop linking to such places or stop being read; there are very few places where the average reader is also going to have a subscription to any site it links to, because if they have a susbscription to the sites it links to, why would they bother reading about it second hand?

A glaring example is Wikipedia: how can you possibly cite an edit on an open encyclopedia by linking to a site that requires payment?

Local news monopoly

[tepples]

When I see a news site requiring registration or subscription I just hit the back button. [...] My local paper became subscription only online. I use to check the site out every day. I haven't check it since the change.

Now what site do you check for news about your town, as opposed to some other town? Not all towns necessarily have a competing reliable paper without a paywall.

Re:Local news monopoly

[Rogerborg]

Now what site do you check for news about your town, as opposed to some other town?

Does it matter? A free site, or no site. The significant factor in the decision (for many eyeballs) is a barrier to entry, not the availability of a free alternative.

Either way, the pay site has lost eyeballs and advertising revenue in return for nothing.

Re:Local news monopoly

[nicolas.kassis]

Exactly, now I just watch the news on TV, ignore the paper. After years of reading that paper I thought I'd miss it but not really.

Re:Local news monopoly

[tepples]

Exactly, now I just watch the news on TV

Watch it, or you'll rouse the "I'm proud not to own a TV" comedians who occasionally pop up on Slashdot.

Re:Why I like the NY Times

[Anonymous Coward]

What so not only do we get MS astroturfing, but NY Times astroturfing? How do I get a job posting astroturf?

Posted anon because people around here seem to hate when someone points out the astro turfing.

Re:Goatse

[TrisexualPuppy]

Correction: It was already stretched as a result of him swallowing a basketball.

Seems to be about Cookies

[Saint Stephen]

In FF, I have NYTimes cookies blocked, so 99% of the time I get the "you have to register - it's free" ! Thing

Lots of other sites are similar, (SJ Mercury News is bad).

If I really *have* to read that story, I just use IE and then purge my cookies.

But most of the times I no longer read the NY Times website directly. It doesn't really matter, because almost every single story on the TV news or ANYWHERE originates at the NY Times.

pull the other one

[edittard]

CmdrTaco claims he rejected a story. Yeah right. Want to buy a bridge?

Re:pull the other one

[cbhacking]

Actually, this was probably the most interesting part of the whole summary.

I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, *yesterday* I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason.

Holy crap, a /. editor doing editorial things! Hopefully this fine example will encourage the others.

Or even when they can't

[b00le]

New Scientist magazine has tried twice, to my knowledge, to restrict web access to the subscribers to their - very expensive - magazine. They did not even offer a web-only subscription. I wrote each time pointing out that this was foolish, and I would have been prepared to pay a reasonable (i.e. small) sum for access, but was fobbed off with a bit of corporate boilerplate. Each time the paywall lasted a few weeks before coming down.

Re:Or even when they can't

[Sporkinum]

I never go to the New Scientist website. I have tried reading a laptop on the toilet, but it just doesn't work. New Scientist is prime bathroom reading material.
I also hardly ever read any NY Times articles because they are pay walled. Looks like the best solution for most of this stuff is electronic media. I would gladly pay for a New Scientist e-reader subscription, and possibly a NY Times one as well.

Re:Or even when they can't

[Captain Hook]

Thats interesting about the New Scientist paywall coming down. I used to be an avid reader about 5 years ago, logged on at every weekday lunchtime to read something or other. I even clicked the occasional ad there when I found one relavent to me, especially links to amature telescopes etc which I was looking to buy when I had enough money.

Then they implemented a paywall, some articles you could read, some you couldn't read or couldn't finish. I got so fed up with the potluck approach to reading an article I just stopped going and didn't even realise the paywall had come down. If I saw a link any going back to newscientist.com I just stopped reading at that point because I knew I wouldn't be able to read the original article.

I'm just checked and I seem to be able to access everything again, but I probably won't start reading the site again, it's just not part of my routine any more.

Cue FireFox Add-on in 3. . .2. . .

[JSBiff]

How long before someone creates an add-on that auto-purges cookies from such sites before every page load, I wonder?

I dissent

[pickens]

There are stories, generally op-eds, "think pieces," and commissioned pieces with original research that appear on the NY Times and no where else.

As an example, I submitted a story yesterday about Isaac Newton on new historical research that explains why he spent thirty years of his life working on alchemy.

That story is only on the Times and no where else.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/science/12newton.html

Take a look at my submission. I think it's a good story and based on my experience, one that slashdot normally would have accepted.

http://slashdot.org/submission/1354636/Isaac-Newton-Alchemist

Show me where you can find that story anyplace else on the web.

Re:I dissent

[JSBiff]

Yeah, well, NYTime is free to do whatever they want. Slashdot is also free to do whatevery *they* want. Slashdot doesn't want to have links which are basically inaccessible to most of their readers.

Fundamentally, I'm not interested in paying for 100 subscriptions to 100 different news sites, and I think neither is almost anyone else. Since Slashdot links to so many news sources, I can't possibly pay for individual subscriptions to all of them. So, Slashdot does the most reasonable thing in the situation - instead of frustrating their readers with links to paywalls, they just reject the story until an accessible source can be found.

*Most* news stories will be carried by other sources, you just have to wait a bit. The rather esoteric example you gave, it's true, is the type of story which perhaps no one else will run. The rest of us mostly have decided *we don't have to read such stories*. Our lives will go on if we miss out on why Newtond dabbled in Alchemy, even though as Nerds, we'd probably be interested.

Longer term, I think the answer to the basic problem here, is that the newspublishing industry needs to collaborate on creating a central clearinghouse sort of system - a sort of micro-transaction system which spans hundreds or thousands of news sources. I would go there and add credit to my account, then when I go to a site with premium content, I could be offered a choice "Do you want to purchase access to this article from XYZ.com for 5 cents, from your account, or purchase access to the entire site for a day for 25 cents? Current credit: $8.55).

That way I don't have to screw around with subscriptions to a site that I might only read one or two articles from in a given month (or only one article, ever).

There's just too many content sources to setup seperate accounts, payment details, and recurring monthly subscription fees, if I'm only interested in the occasional article from any given site.

Re:I dissent

[Anonymous Coward]

Google it

Read it at:

      http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article827154.ece

and a dozen other places.

Re:I dissent

[Anonymous Coward]

Well you could just read about it in the book than the NYT ripped-off for that article.

The Janus Face of Genius

Re:I dissent

[Anonymous Coward]

Searching Google for isaac newton alchemy give about 92900 hits. This is what your article is competing with. If it hides behind a paywall or registration, it is not in the competition for me - I will never see it.

Re:I dissent

[geekoid]

You want me to pay to read your retelling of things everyone knows? That's a great reason t buy your book, not to subscribe to a news paper.

Re:I dissent

[stobrd]

Why is this modded funny? There are many examples like this. The NYT and the WSJ are among the best original sources out there. I believe if they disappear just because of this "I want everything on the internet for free" mentality, the overall quality of news on the internet - strike that - the quality of news everywhere would suffer greatly. They do the real work and don't just sit in their armchairs and watch some aggregator. The information these papers provide and the quality in which they write it up and present it to us is easily worth it. Take the price for the paper version, subtract paper, ink, delivery cost and whatnot and I'll pay it gladly if that enables them to maintain their overall quality of journalism. This mindset that something has to be free if it's digital is really annoying. Not all news are automatically put online and spread everywhere.

Re:I dissent

[Bigjeff5]

There are stories, generally op-eds, "think pieces," and commissioned pieces with original research that appear on the NY Times and no where else.

Which are no different than a quality blog.

News is now so easy to get, it's not worth paying for its duplication. If you've got local news that is accessible by the whole planet, then these progressively less-local news agencies (state, region, national, etc) become very redundant. You can replace the news portion of those agencies with simple aggregate services and serve the whole world with a staff of 20.

What's left are, like you said, the op-eds and opinion articles. These are quickly being over-taken by blogs - there are some very high quality ones out there, and the news agencies are having trouble keeping up.

It's a totally different world these days. No longer do you have to wait until today to find out what happened yesterday or the day before. It's even free, to boot.

Re:I dissent

[ne1av1cr]

What's to keep someone from designing a little app that, when you right click on an article, gives you the option of copying the content to a free site and giving the user a URL to post?

quality of journalism

[No. 24601]

I think the NYT is going to work doubly hard, even triply hard to gain some sort of competitive advantage in their quality of journalism. Yes, they have some great stories. But to be totally honest, most of what they write about or offer opinions on is stuff that can be found somewhere else on the Net nowadays. I'd say they are not much worse, but also not much better than a lot of other news sites out there. Good luck to them if they create a stupid pay wall.

Losing subscribers and advertisers

[Comboman]

Murdoch's paywall sites (with the exception of the WSJ) are not just losing subscribers, they're also losing advertisers. A newspaper can't survive on subscription fees alone, advertising has always been the largest source of revenue.

Re:Losing subscribers and advertisers

[delinear]

Exactly, if they can keep the ad revenue at the same level per user and charge a subscription then it might be more viable even with a big drop in users, but the fact is advertisers don't want to show ads to a tiny userbase, they demand high volume. The result is that you'll first see advertisers leaving, and that loss of demand will drive down the price per ad impression, which means (unless you planned the subscription model around having no advertising - in which case stop being greedy and actually have no advertising and people might like the service more) you have to quickly hit the subscribers for more money or find some other way to reduce costs. None of those options end well.

Re:Losing subscribers and advertisers

[ftobin]

advertising has always been the largest source of revenue.

I would not assume that past revenue models will have the same value going forward.

Good journalism is worth paying for

[jburroug]

I've had an account with the NYTimes site for longer than I can remember and I've happily signed up for every pay scheme they've tried. Reporters work hard to provide a valuable service and I'm happy to pay for it. I might be a bit of an anomaly given how poorly news papers and magazines are doing these days, but I also pay for a print subscription to the The Economist, Popular Woodworking, Fine Woodworking, MAKE and Discover. Information I care about, thoroughly researched and professionally edited has real value to me. I hope the Time's latest attempt at attracting readers and making money off them works out, given the problems at the Tribune family of publications right now America is desperately low on world class news outlets as it is.

Not to say that paywalls aren't a touch annoying and disruptive and I don't want to buy a full subscription to every publication that has a single article I'm interested in, but I wouldn't mind paying some small fee for the one story I wanted to read. The problem is finding a way to sell users a single article at a fair price that isn't overwhelmed by the transaction costs of processing the payment. The market needs a really good micropayment system, that can profitably handle transactions in the $.25-1.00 range. The digital equivalent of pocket change has yet to show up outside of walled off services like iTunes and other app stores.

Cheers,

Josh

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[0123456]

The problem is finding a way to sell users a single article at a fair price that isn't overwhelmed by the transaction costs of processing the payment. The market needs a really good micropayment system, that can profitably handle transactions in the $.25-1.00 range.

I don't remember the last time I read a newspaper article which was worth $0.25 to me. Most 'news' just isn't very useful to anyone other than news junkies, and that's even ignoring the majority of 'news' that's just regurgitated press releases or celebrity gossip.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[Anonymous Coward]

What is a micropayment to you is a large sum of cash to many in the world. There's also issues of access, there's people who can't even get a debit card (due to the Chex system which has no appeal) let alone a credit card. Some of this stuff is arguably a public right (thus the invention of the BBC in the UK). Be careful, you're thinking in a microcosm. In an age when anyone can attend a MIT class via OpenCourseWare you're championing alienating a large group of folks from basic news.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there actually any good journalism available for sale?
Read a few newspaper stories about an area you actually know about, probably science or tech since you're on slashdot. Then try saying that journalism is accurate and reliable or even just good without bursting into laughter.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[jburroug]

What is a micropayment to you is a large sum of cash to many in the world. There's also issues of access, there's people who can't even get a debit card (due to the Chex system which has no appeal) let alone a credit card. Some of this stuff is arguably a public right (thus the invention of the BBC in the UK). Be careful, you're thinking in a microcosm. In an age when anyone can attend a MIT class via OpenCourseWare you're championing alienating a large group of folks from basic news.

Look the bottom line is that someone has to pay the salaries of the people researching the news, writing and editing the stories. Someone has to pay the cost of sending the reporters to where the news is happening and all the other costs that go into providing accurate coverage of a story. Someone has to pay the hosting costs to deliver the content all the people that want to read it.

The BBC is a great service and tax supported by UK citizens, NPR and the like are supported by the donations of those that can afford to donate. Otherwise news outlets have to sell their service to the people consuming it. For those outlets like the NYT or the The Economist that don't get government support I would think that the ability to sell articles one at a time to people that could afford a quarter or whatever for the information would be useful.

I'm not championing alienating anyone from the news - if newspapers keep going bust that's going to alienate a lot more people from the news than a micropayment system that helps keep them afloat would.

Cheers,

Josh

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[jburroug]

The problem is finding a way to sell users a single article at a fair price that isn't overwhelmed by the transaction costs of processing the payment. The market needs a really good micropayment system, that can profitably handle transactions in the $.25-1.00 range.

I don't remember the last time I read a newspaper article which was worth $0.25 to me. Most 'news' just isn't very useful to anyone other than news junkies, and that's even ignoring the majority of 'news' that's just regurgitated press releases or celebrity gossip.

Nice use of 'scare' quotes to let us all know what you 'think' of news sources. You've added nothing to the discussion with this comment, you're parroting the same facile crap that other ignorant slobs espouse in order to justify their continued willful ignorance. It's the same retarded logic that political drops out spout "Both parties are corrupt and stupid and smelly and are both gonna screw me so I don't bother to vote or get involved or understand anything"

If you have such a low opinion of the news business why are even reading and commenting on a story about newspapers?

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[jburroug]

Is there actually any good journalism available for sale?
Read a few newspaper stories about an area you actually know about, probably science or tech since you're on slashdot. Then try saying that journalism is accurate and reliable or even just good without bursting into laughter.

Depends on the paper actually. I've found The Economist's science and technology coverage to be surprisingly good in fact and their quarterly technology report is excellent. Albeit more focused on the economic, social, political and environmental impacts of technology and the companies driving it instead of the pure geeky goodness. The NYT does OK in science and tech reporting - I really miss Olivia Judson's column I hope she comes back or they find another active science writer to do something similar.

Discover has really improved the last few years since I let my old sub expire a while back, I was pleasantly surprised enough by a news stand purchase a year ago to resubscribe. Hell they are worth supporting just for the Bad Astronomer blog that they host.

Good reporting is still out there, you just have to put the time into finding it and be willing to pay for it.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[Bigjeff5]

Really, the only people who need to be paid are the front-line reporters. After that all you need is an aggregate service and some organization/categorization. For the most part regional and national news coverage is redundant. It's rarely original news reporting, it is almost always gathered from a local affiliate and re-broadcast.

The big national news coverage has served as our aggregate service in the past, basically. We just never looked at it like that. So when a new technology allows us to do the same thing for several orders of magnitude less money, obviously the old way is not going to be able to keep up.

All we really need these days is something like the AP, we don't need the major news companies that support it.

Obviously these are sweeping generalizations, and there are exceptions for everything. But generally speaking, they are true.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[Anonymous Coward]

You've added nothing to the discussion with this comment, you're parroting the same facile crap that other ignorant slobs espouse in order to justify their continued willful ignorance. It's the same retarded logic that political drops out spout "Both parties are corrupt and stupid and smelly and are both gonna screw me so I don't bother to vote or get involved or understand anything"

That's a LOT of words just to say 'I disagree with you'.

Re:Good journalism is worth paying for

[bws111]

The front-line reporters are the only ones who need to be paid? So the editors, management, admin (HR, payroll, etc), and support (IT, secretaries, janitors, etc) are all going to work for free? The reporters are going to be able to travel to the news for free? The buildings housing the offices are free?

What is this new technology that is allowing news gathering to be done for several orders of magnitude less money? AP, etc have been called 'wire services' for over a century now for a reason.

OK, so all you need is something like AP, but you don't need anything to support it? What sense does that make? How is it supported? Or are you saying you would be willing to pay a single huge outfit like AP for the news, but would not be willing to pay smaller companies which not only use AP content but also provide their own content (yes, the NYT has a LOT of content that is their own).

Re:Seems not to like Corporate networks or somethi

[Anonymous Coward]

The explanation is that HTTP is not very friendly in terms of user tracking. In other words, this scheme WILL NOT WORK. The site needs to know who is on their 2nd+ visit to block them. But in order to do that needs to identify them uniquely. There are no 100%-proof methods of doing this with HTTP.

The site can use cookies, even more devious cookies like that "evercookie" thingy. But ultimately they depend on the user/browser not figuring out they have the cookie. Once they do, they can get rid of them.

Which is why I suppose the use IP addresses. But that has both false positive and negatives, due to things like ISP allocating IP via DHCP, NAT, corporate proxies etc.

Still, it's a nice gesture. I like it when they at least try to find a middle ground.

Object =void()

[some old guy]

It isn't as though there's anything in the NYT that isn't freely available on Salon, MoveOn.org, or the Huffington Post.

BBC's model

[pckl300]

I like BBC's model. News is paid for by the citizens, and is available to everyone, even non-brits. It's like information is a right. And, despite being funded by the government, they don't seem to have much slant that I can detect.

Re:BBC's model

[geekoid]

It use to be like the in the US. TV news was paid for my the government.
Many idiots on /. will equate the to controlling the news. But if you look at it in that time period, it was not biased in that manner. When the feds cut the funding, they had to make money by appeasing advertisers. Which has become being a mouth piece for the corporation that sponsors them.

Some time I try to think about how Fox et' al. would have shown the McCarthy hearings. Scary.

The Single Subscription Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with paywalls for me is that I refuse to pay more than a buck a month for a subscription to only one site. There needs to be a third party service where you can bundle a few of these together and use 1 username and password to access the papers/magazines you choose. They do this all the time for the print editions, buy this mag and get this one half off or sell them hugely discounted through fundraisers. Why are they not doing this online. If I could sign up to get the NYTimes, Economist, TNR and maybe the WaPo for say 5 bucks a month I would gladly pay. But I'm not going to have 8 accounts at 8 different papers each charging me 10 bucks a month. I really like the articles but I can read blogs and there are some that are very well written for free.

Re:The Single Subscription Problem

[scamper_22]

Absolutely.

I've thought about this as well.
They could start teaming up with ISPs. So you sign up for 'news package' with your ISP for $5 / month. If you browse from your home ip, no login, nothing... Maybe they give you a username/password if you really want to access it from another computer (work, someone else's house...)

Smartphones could help here as well as they tend to have 'app-stores' and integrated payment methods so you can have news apps.

I get this on my phone...

[rickb928]

On my Android phone, using the Google 'News and Weather' widget, I get this with any NYT reference to an article in the widget.

Then when I go to the NYT link, I get a blank screen which is the offer to log in.

It doesn't work on my phone, possibly because it's Flash, possibly cause it just renders badly, I can't really tell yet.

So the phone widget is getting headline links to sites that con't work on the phone the widget is written for...

Ah, yes, Google. Such a failure sometimes. Beta is no excuse.

Mind you, I am running Eclair on a G1, Cyanogenmod 5.0.8, so they and my carrier have deniability. They will cling to that.

Then there are the WSJ links, which no longer show me a login prompt on my phone at all. Nice. So far the WSJ doesn't make me climb the wall.

Quality is not level

[jtla]

The correct model for paying for content is obviously yet to be discovered but refusing to pay for content because a free version is available does not mean that the quality is equal. You could refuse to pay for cable and watch free shows with an antennae (or you could before the HD switch no reception maybe an issue). I'll watch the free show on NBC or a better comparison would be HBO - you pay $15 a month extra for HBO. HBO then supposedly gives you content worth paying for. The NYT and other online news sources can be this model. A minority of people order HBO but enough do to make it profitable.

Re:Quality is not level

[Bigjeff5]

On the other hand, just because you spent a lot of money on content doesn't mean it is as good as the free services.

Compare any cable news network to broadcast news. The broadcast networks have higher quality content across the board. You get less content, but better content, and it's free.

Also, the most popular shows on TV are on the broadcast networks, not subscription networks. That doesn't mean the subscription networks' shows aren't any good, but they can't be much better than the broadcast networks' shows, or people would be flocking to the subscription and ignoring the broadcast. That just isn't the case.

Citing pay sources on Wikipedia

[tepples]

how can you possibly cite an edit on an open encyclopedia by linking to a site that requires payment?

Wikipedia has two separate policies: one for citing the reliable sources on which claims depend, and another for the "External links" section at the bottom of each article. Because not enough scholarly journals have open access, citing a paper publication or a paywalled online publication is acceptable as long as the publication is a reliable source. This section of the external links policy explains the difference.

Quoting from abstract

[Anonymous Coward]

I once did this submission where the full article was behind a paywall which I didn't have access either, but I was quoting from the abstract which was enough to make my point:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1167600/Shareholder-value-and-agency-theory-at-its-worst

Why

[ThatsNotPudding]

I see no reason to actually pay for news online.

Why did the acronym 'ACTA' suddenly leap to mind when I read this?

work arounds

[MountainBoiler]

Never mind that if a site lets first N visits free, it can always be free just by deleting all cookies for that site (and ancillary cookies).

I happen to enjoy reading some of the NYT's oped writers. Every now and then, I just need to delete all "*.nytimes.*" cookies to continue enjoying the articles.

But this is what those crafty markets dreamed up. Doesn't mean it isn't difficult to bypass.

Re:Why the wall won't work: AFR charges $100/month

[Zero return]

The Australian Financial review charges about $100/month for news and seems to be doing OK: https://subscribe.afr.com/afr/default.aspx?referrer=1

Re:Seems not to like Corporate networks or somethi

[TubeSteak]

I'm sure there are sites out there to help with "free account required" login pages, but what's the betting that they start slowly creeping the payments in and creeping the freebies down?

http://www.bugmenot.com
I found a 5 character NYTimes l/p on bugmenot.com ~10 years ago and i've been using it ever since.

For anything not on bugmenot.com, I hit the "forgot password" button and try a few @mailinator.com addresses.

US analogy

[KingAlanI]

Kind of like how work of US government employees on-the-job is not copyrighted?

Re:US analogy

[pckl300]

Yeah, but the US government doesn't seem to be doing anything nearly as useful as the BBC. We invest ourselves into being governed, but we don't get much back as far as public services. That is, in comparison to most European countries.

Re:US analogy

[KingAlanI]

Yeah, what I said there works more in concept than in practice.
And not to mention the annoying loophole of "pay a contractor to do it, and they can still copyright it"

paywall devalues free traffic

[stefanPryor]

A little while ago I was reading on wikipedia about new york city's financial problems circa 1975. The wikipedia article claimed "there was a compromise between the city and the public unions", a link to an old new york times article was provided as a citation. I followed the link and encountered some kind of registration/log-in page, I suppose if I were to register, next I would encounter some sort of paywall. I simply did a google search for "new york city 1975 union compromise" and the first result was time magazine online, which provided me the full text of an article on that subject, dating back to that era. Contained on the page I viewed were links to more content from the same media conglomerate, perhaps customized to be more topical and relevant with the aid of an analytics company like google.

If new york times cannot generate a profit on free traffic, they need to look into partnering with someone who can. Putting a paywall in front of non-exclusive content devalues that content.

Almost...

[vanyel]

This is a step in what I think is the right balance between participation, being relevant and being able to stay in business: Let the first N/month be free (N needs to be around 5-10 at least though), and then require subscription. If you're going back to the same source that often, it's reasonable to be expected to help support it, and it's in your own best interests to do so. Yet it still lets people share links and pass around info that might not otherwise be seen.

It is still free

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont mind quickly registering on the NYT website to view the stories. It doesnt even seem like a real paywall as I can still see all the recent stories once I login without paying anything. It looks like you only have to pay for NYT articles between 1922-1987.

Re:Seems not to like Corporate networks or somethi

[Anonymous Coward]

The paywalls all rely upon cookies. Use private browsing and you can read as many articles as you want.