Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Living With a Nerd
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.
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?
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.
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.
which is totally what she said
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
It use to be like the in the US. TV news was paid for my the government. /. 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.
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Some time I try to think about how Fox et' al. would have shown the McCarthy hearings. Scary.
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