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

"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: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.

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.