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

[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

[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

[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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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

[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.

"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 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.

Re:Porn mode

[CarpetShark]

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

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.