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
What, people want us to pay to access some stuff on the internet? What's next, /. offering subscriptions?
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.
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.
My work here is dung.
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
This is why I don't use NYT for a news source. There's plenty of others out there.
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
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
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
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.
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.