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.
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.
If I surf in porn mode, can NYT see I've been there before?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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.
Palm trees and 8
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.
testing out my trending skills
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.
SSC
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
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
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.
In the beginning, there was null.
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.
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.