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Why Paywalls Are Good, But NYT's Is Flawed
GMGruman writes "The New York Times has taken a lot of heat for daring to start charging for its product. (What nerve! Imagine if grocery stores, phone companies, or even employees began charging for their wares!) But the problem, InfoWorld columnist Galen Gruman argues, is that its paywall is poorly designed. It encourages unpaid usage in massive quantities via Twitter and other feeds, undermining its very purpose, and it makes multiple-device mobile users — the growing population — pay more than anyone else. Both should be fixed. But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing. In mobile, there's a chance to fix that, but in the way is not just the Web's free-loader mentality but the pricing of carriers for data transport that take a larger chunk out of people's budgets than they should, making it that much harder for people to pony up for the value of the content they get through those carriers' pipes."
Paywalls fail.
It's always confirmation bias!
the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
...or maybe we're just moving to an open content model (i.e., like FOSS). After all, information does want to be free.
Or rightvalued?
ISPs and content providers compete to be paid for the same thing, news at 11. In other news, people still refuse to learn how to code effectively.
I think blogs, and even facebook itself demonstrate very well that there will always be some content out there.
The major news sites just have to revamp, and stop being centers for advertising but centers for content and the people will come back. when a 5 page web article only has 2 pages of actual content you have a serious problem in your layout designs.
Besides paywalls are only good for only letting the people in who want to know your opinions. The rest of us know your opinions are just that and would prefer facts.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The summary here seems to focus on a minor (page 3) point in the article, but, man, what a bad point it is:
And the Times appears to be making a big mistake by letting people get unlimited access to its content if they come from Twitter and other feeds, apparently to not turn of the young-adult population. All that will do is perpetuate the free-loader culture and simply shift users to those conduits, turning them from grazers to firehose-feeders -- and undermining the whole notion of paying for frequent content usage.
Silly. This isn't a "big mistake". It's quite canny — they're paying people (with access to content) for providing word-of-mouth advertising. The cost (an article read for free) is very low and the benefit (lots of visitors come by without being annoyed) is high. It's a good move.
Paywalls are bad because they hide information behind a wall where search engines and casual users cannot reach.
I think the NYT implementation is brilliant, because content will still be indexed by search engines, and users can get around the paywall in various ways so casual users need not really notice there is one much.
Where the NYT is falling down is pricing, they should provide a pricing point that lets people who want to support the paper but not be so high that it encourages skirting. The the NYT would have a pay hedge, where you could see beyond it but be happy to pay a small fee at the ornamental gate to enter if you wanted to spend more time inside.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Imagine if grocery stores, phone companies, or even employees earnt money from ads plastered all over their products and then asked for more off you!
the way they do it now, we'd pay to not have to read it, except that we require the 'end user' experience, hypenosys, fear/hate level, stuff like that.
I thought most of what they published on there was uninformative, bias , and useless static. Why would someone pay for it.
Blogs are as good or better sources of information , at least the people that publish them make their biases evident.
I have seen few unbalanced, unbiased news articles in my lifetime and non of them were from 'mainstream' press.
Either NPR or Christian Science Monitor but even both of those certainly have bias, they just make some attempt to keep it under control.
The fact is 'the press' has lost credibility with many people. It is no longer held accountable in a way that makes it any more worthy to pay for then my next door neighbors opinion on what is happening. There used to be a saying 'just the facts' and if that were the case I'd think they were doing a service worth paying for.
..so I don't accidently click on their pay-walled articles and I'm happy. So is Rupert, because I don't get a look at his precious content.
No, information (and porn) does not want to be free. That is a false premise.
People want information (and porn) to be free. Or to be more precise, people want everything they personally use to be free. It's called self-interest.
You just have to make information (or porn) worth paying for. That's hard to do when it's so easy to comparable information (or porn) for free elsewhere.
Just replace the word "information" with "porn" in all arguments and you get rid of the false moral calls that "free information serves a higher purpose" which is just an excuse for not paying for the benefit you get from the information.
1. Set up a paywall to block all traffic to my site.
2. ???
3. Profit!
Check out this comparison of digital subscription prices across different media:
http://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the-new
You'll notice that the NY Times is grossly overpriced.
This will fail because it's difficult for anyone to tell what links are going to work and what links won't.
Post an article's link to your Twitter account? No paywall.
Post it to your Facebook page? Paywall!
Post it on your blog? No paywall!
Send it in an email? Who knows!
The rules are confusing. People operate on the assumption that if a link works for them, they can share it with everyone. This is going to result in a lot of frustration.
Paywalls only work when there is something of value behind them. Since this particular paywall only has NYT content behind it, it is unlikely to succeed.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I like the NYT content enough to pay a flat $5/month for all web access combined. If they would hit that "why not?" price they should get plenty of subscribers. Above that and I really ask myself if it is worth it. $35/month is getting close to cable TV pricing, so I don't know what they are thinking with that.
Decry that the internet has made producing "content" hard to justify for financial reasons; ignore the fact that people will still pay for exceptional content. The complainers are the ones who can't make a comfortable living creating fair to good content -- all the internet has done is raise the necessary level of quality before it's profitable. Whiners should go find a different job.
No the NYT is being shat upon because they are charging more for their wares than people that serve up video and audio. It's $36/year to subscribe to Pandora. NYT wants $35 for a month's worth of access. And you think WE are the insane ones? Get a grip.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
THIS IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE See how annoying someone shouting at you can be?
Video Media have two different business models.
TNT/USA/NBC/ and most of the internet all use an advertiser supported model. Their adds are annoying, but the content is free.
Then there is the HBO/Showtime model. They charge extra because they don't have commercials. None in the middle of the content whatsoever, and only for their own content bookending their content.
If the NYT or other news media want to go the 'pay' route, then they have to follow the other successful pay video media - no advertisements if you pay. Best of all, if you don't do ads, then you can give your clients their privacy. No advertisements means no targetting means no need to invade their privacy. Don't track what they view or do. And brag about not tracking them. Cripes, even offer search functionality without tracking.
They could even offer a double route - ads if you don't pay, no ads if you do pay.
I personally would be more than willing to pay $15 a month to get the New York Times without advertisements, and with any searching I do from their web site going untracked.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing.
By all means, let them disappear! That would increase the signal-to-noise ratio.
Yes, it's likely that the national paper with the third highest circulation* is of interest to no one.
*Data is admittedly out of date, thought I'm confident the premise still stands.
the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
then why did you write your article and spam it on /.? If not for income then it must just be an ego thing, right?
What I can't understand is if the mobile version and web version still have ads, and the printing costs are eliminated, and distribution costs are all but eliminated, why they need to choose the $180 price point a year instead of the $99 price point. I can see $200 on the iPad, with more limited ads.
It is the nature of an enterprise to try to maximize profit. The NYT, and The Daily, and WSJ, all are trying to maximize the value of a product. However, I can see publications like HufPo, using the overestimation of value of the other rags as an opportunity to put them out of business. I have no ill will for the NYT, I have subscribed to the digital editions when they were more reasonably priced. I think they will find few customers at this price point.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
What nerve! Imagine if grocery stores, phone companies, or even employees began charging for their wares!
Charging for something is fine. We can just go elsewhere. The reason we're annoyed is that they dangled it in front of us for a long time, acting like it was free, and then one day tried to charge us for it. We assumed that a respectable organization like NYT would be consistent. Instead, they pulled the same dirty two-faced tricks used by less reputable organizations to try to extract money from people who find it painful to adapt when they are yanked around. It's more than just "nerve" to resort to using bait, hook, and then switch techniques. It's obnoxious.
Interesting the shit that gets first page on slashdot.
While I agree with the idea of paying for quality news (journalists have to eat, after all) and think NYT's paywall is well implemented (uncounted twit redirects, 20 free views, etc.), the "ultimate" edition price is quite high.
Here's an image showing their prices in relation to some other paywalls: http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2011/03/subvisual.jpg
All Digital Access:* $8.75 per week (billed every 4 weeks at $35.00) Unlimited access to NYTimes.com, plus smartphone apps and tablet apps Unlimited access to NYTimes.com from any computer or device Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for BlackBerry, iPhone and Android-powered phones Unlimited access to the NYTimes app for iPad, plus Times Reader 2.0 and the NYTimes app for the Chrome Web Store
They do have a cheaper rate ($195 for a year), but it only includes access to the website, I believe.
They did a good job job walling off their columnists when that was a for-pay section a few back. You can request google to kep the reference, but not the full cache. A few pirate sites copied the NYT columns verbatim. But the NY was pretty effective in closing them down quickly.
You do realize that the NYT has been bleeding subscribers at a steady rate since before the advent of the Internet, right? I will admit that there are a lot of people who believe what they read in the NYT, although considering their history, I have to wonder why.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
From a commercial sponsor. They said because I was in the "1000 click per month" group. I have to decide by Sunday. I hope I wont get inudated by extra ads then. the Times is already pretty obnoxious with an average of three video ads per page.
At 50 cents per day, the subscription price was higher than I wanted, but not onerous. Its 1/4 the print price. I was going to procrastinate signing up hoping for some discount.
My biggest problem with newspaper paywalls is that in any different week I get linked to stories in probably 15-20 different news sites. If every site charged $30+ a month to access, how many could I possibly afford? I wouldn't mind paying a bit to support news agencies but if all of them put up paywalls, how can they expect us all to pay for every one of them? NYT might be able to get away with it but a model like that would dry up every small paper out there because no one would pay for them. If it were somehow possible for me to pay $10-15 a month and have it split between the various news sites I visit I would be fine with that, but that would be very difficult to implement.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
You're misinterpreting circulation with quality. If you want the classic counter, look at Fox News. They have more viewers than other TV news channels but is their quality that much better? [I'd at least argue that it's no worse in quality but I don't watch any TV news so I can't really say].
Find another reason to produce content. What's the cost/benefit ratio of societal ignorance and tedium? What is more profitable? An intelligent, lively, healthy public, or an ignorant, dull, diseased one? Don't answer that!. I don't think I really want to know...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The price isn't the problem. It is the double charging for getting the same content on multiple devices.
If you buy the paper on your iPad, you shouldn't be locked out from using the browser if you want to read a story at work. The only thing this does is piss of the people who are willing to give you money.
Fox News has segments where they stick pundits together from different parties and let them dog fight, then people who don't like Fox News go "no the Conservative always wins" when they're both making ridiculous asses of themselves. (In other words, they consistently argue that the conservative has better arguments and the liberal is a retard, and thus Fox News is run by conservatives with a strong bias, and conservatives are retards so it's misinformation ... see the logical disconnect between one point and another?)
It's still sensationalist bullshit coming from two idiots who know nothing.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Here's the deal,
IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet. IF enough news organizations fail, then there will be a demand for GOOD journalism. When the demand is there, the money will be there, and paywalls will make good sense.
BUT not now. Right now we've got every broadcast and cable news outlet flooding the Internet with news content. Some of it is even decent coverage. So as long as there is a decent option for free news, then paywalls are irrelevant.
That means paywall promoters need to wait another 15 years (or however long existing news outlets can bleed money) OR they will learn how to make money without charging for News.
-CF
Trying to get payment is hampered not so much by people's unwillingness to pay... but by the inconvenience of paying.
1. I don't want to sign up for every single site. This is what really hampers most paywalls. The internet gives you loads of content from lots of sources. Links are being sent all the time. So you need a way to give payments without requiring people to sign up for every single site.
2. Micro-payments seemed like an interesting solution... except once again... there is no standard and often you still need to sign up.
3. What you really want to an 3rd party provider making payment easy. We see that with respect to mobile app stores. Often they tie directly in to your providers billing so you only get one bill. So it becomes very easy to subscribe to sources.
4. It would require a lot of coordination, but a similar thing can happen on the internet in general. Your ISP can help with payments. They could even have packages. For example, ATT might offer you an unlimited news package for $5.00/month subscribing you to all news sites. More convenient if you don't even need to login through your home computer... they can coordinate. Packages like this would make it much more sustainable.
Overall its going to require a fair amount of innovation, but I think coordinating with the ISPs or payment or identity services is going to be the key.
I read somewhere that NYT would have you paying $30 per month, which works out to $360 per year. Meanwhile if you get home delivery on dead trees, the website cites the price for zip code 10001 as $3.10 per week, which works out to $161.20 per year. (Outside New York it seems to be $3.70 per week.)
Why on earth should it cost me more to get the online version? If anything, it should be cheaper. I wouldn't mind a paywall, even a more draconian one than what they propose, as long as it's priced where the print one is, or slightly lower.
Bah humbug. The actual content on most sites isn't all that large. Strip out the flash ads, images unrelated to the article, gratuitous javascript, etc., and you're left with the very small amount that actually matters.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing.
Err, you mean devalued USELESS content. Note how "we" call it "content" instead of information or news, because information and news are valuable. "content" on the other hand is a placeholder to cover up some empty space.
Lets summarize the "valuable" content I see when I pull up the times front page right now:
Radiation is bad for your kids. no kidding? I never knew. Thank $diety the times is here so I can learn that. I was going to feed my kids enriched U-235 tonight, but now I'm "scared straight".
An old woman at least two generations older than me, of no cultural relevance to me whatsoever, has died. no kidding? I thought humans were immortal.
"6 things to feel good about food" Thats the headline. Seriously. You've gotta be kidding me. How much are they paying me to read that?
Warfare continues in the middle east. Since 3000 BC, pretty much uninterrupted. Wake me when they glass some cities with nukes, or the US finds some good guys to support (good luck). Till then thats a snoozer.
"How a building dispute can sink a sale" You've gotta be kidding me. I'll file that for next time I sell a condo in Brooklyn, yeah right soon I'm sure.
"The New Old Age: Simple Rules for Better Sleep". OMG. I gotta stop now.
I'm supposed to pay attention to this mental chewing gum? Even worse, I'm supposed to pay for it? And this was the "best" they could do, it being the front page?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The nerve of these massive media companies controlling almost all aspects of our knowledge of events around us and internationally. How the quality has sunk as share prices have risen, the unrelenting drive towards profit damaging concepts like professional integrity, validating the facts, and presenting the facts in a neutral fashion.Why, for all these things they've done we should pay them more.
Er, no. The reason blogs have become so damn popular and competition for conventional media outlets is because the quality has slipped to the point that individuals with little to no training, working in their spare time, can create competitive sources of information. Those sources of information are being made available for free. There's little value being added by paying for a professional to do what an amateur can almost just as well for free.
It's like Graphic Design (a field I am in). Fifty years ago, we had people who specialized in typography, layout, working with the presses. There were a dozen different jobs that, thanks to technology and lowering costs, have all been subsumed into one job: The graphic designer. Printing a book, a magazine, designing a logo, an advertisement for the newspaper -- these were major undertakings, requiring dozens of professionals working together to deliver a product to the client. Today, the graphic designer can do all this in an afternoon, or a few days -- maybe a week for a more engaging project, single-handedly, and at far, far less cost. And there's plenty of things that used to be only accessible to professionals that are now done for free, by hobbyists, at a suitable quality level... Like, for example, community and church newsletters.
The problem with the New York Times is they're still using an old information collection and distribution model. It'd be like a design house trying to model itself after the industry as it was in the 1950s... it's outdated and nobody wants to buy into it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The reason the paywall is so porous is because it has nothing to do with digital access and everything to do with their failing print business. They are using the paywall as a marketing gimmick to raise print subscription numbers, which they value more over digital only subscriptions. It is about the same to get the Sunday edition at the introductory rate than it is to pay for the cheapest digital option. And guess what, if you buy any print subscription you get the highest digital access package included at no extra cost. So the vast majority of people that will get digital access will be print subscribers not digital only subscriptions. Getting around the paywall is so laughably easy as to not even be much of a concern.
The Times is just trying to buy time until they get their act together and figure out what to do to move beyond their print business. Paywall is a temporary stop-gap. They have not changed their mind-set from print-first. They have arguably one of the best newsrooms in the world and are grimly stumbling along at digital distribution of their content.
Look no further then their pathetic mobile strategy. They are trying to segment smartphones and tablets. WTF! They are penalizing multi-device users.
1. NYT's paywall is a stupid hack that your dog could code around.
2. Back when newspapers were necessary, users could afford to have one, maybe two newspapers delivered, unless money was no object (and those for whom money is no object are on the other side of the economy and don't matter to this side). So they got one and they read that one religiously. And it mattered which one they chose. For a marginal amount, you could get one that was better than all of the others. You could get the news you needed for the money you had, and you weren't living with second-best. So it was a deal. Now that everyone has free access to tens of thousands of news sources, nobody needs a paper. Everyone gets more news than they need, for free. So asking people to pay for it is like asking them to pay for bottled air. Sure you'll find a few suckers, and connoisseurs, and emphysema victims or others who are dependent on your exact product, but the rest will think you're just plain nuts.
And at this point, even if ever professional news organization on the planet went to a paywall system, people would crowd-source their information, and the only way to keep the crowd from supplying it is for the news organizations to pay significantly for information from principal sources in the crowd. But we're a ways off from that sort of global social whoredom.
The price isn't the problem. It is the double charging for getting the same content on multiple devices.
Then he price is the problem because to use all your devices you have to pay a lot more than you should.
My take on it being brilliant is that it's the first paywall that will not hide the site and drive most users away.
Now making money is another matter altogether and there the NYT has no idea what they are doing. But it's all just a matter of adjusting pricing to a point where the people who want in will pay.
But again, at least they have not built a pay-wall designed to destroy the site readership.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I never really understood the conservative echo chambers view of the NYT, or NPR for that matter. Why do you people hate it so much?
My perception of both organizations is that they occasionally do an interesting piece but are more than willing to bury a news stories like: CIA black sites, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, etc. and their editorial boards seem to take their lead from whoever is in Washington regardless of party. Although they can both be lazy to when it comes to fact checking the errors usually seem to benefit the neo-con view of the world(examples from the last decade NYT:Judith Miller NPR:anything related to O'Keeffe.) I would think the echo chamber would be in full support of these factual inaccuracies, not against them.
Maybe the issue is that these outlets occasionally deviate from their SOP of protecting those in power and report a different view of the world? Deviate from the script of: its the browns/Muslims/foreigners that are making you poor, when talking to the "right", or its the teabaggers/"stupids" in middle America, when talking to the "left", and start talking about how its those with power/resources who are making you life worse, paying you lower wages for longer hours, sending your children to die in conflicts whose point or reason has been forgotten or eroding your right to basic human rights and dignity and you are made to pay. Stop framing the discussion in terms of it’s the other average person that is you enemy not those in power and you are derided by those who control the echo chamber as having "liberal" bias or a conservative "bias".
As Mike from techdirt points out:
Am I Violating The DMCA By Visiting The NYTimes With NoScript Enabled?
loose: not fitting closely or tightly != lose: to suffer the deprivation of
Read all the reviews on the AppStore about how buggy the NYT iPad app is. It would be fraudulent to put the NYT behind a paywall with an app that crashes all the time. In addition, you are already "paying" for the service by virtue of all the terribly intrusive advertising you have to undure (I had an audio file just start playing on its own while I was reading an article one day...that was the straw that broke the camel's back and I uninstalled the app). Customer service was useless, editor, ombudsman and publisher were even less interested in how their customers were perceiving the NYT as viewed through their app.
If this were easy, they wouldn't need us to do it!
Paywalls decrease the number of individual views for advertisers. Whether this will work or not remains to be seen.
Perhaps they should have adopted an "App" model. I think it may have cost significantly less to let coders build some NYT clients/readers for various platforms.
As to the internet devaluing content, that is the last dying grasp at a straw for industries that have failed to evolve with the rest of us. These are the same industries who alienate their customers by suing them for making backup copies of their DVDs or modding hardware they purchased and own. The same industries that send DMCA take downs to families and churches for showing certain football games to more than 2-3 people at once. The same industries that are putting rootkits on customer's PCs, and including DRM schemes which greatly hinder enjoyment, community involvement and community innovation. The same industries who are knowingly using those DRM tools to spy on customer's activities online. The same industries who are trying to make secret copyright agreements that will certainly strip us as consumers and people of more rights and wealth. Wake up, corporate butt monkeys! If your content is losing value, it's because of the way you're treating your customers and conducting business.Or maybe, just maybe, you are not providing that much of value anymore.
Rant over.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Companies like Audible, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have figured this out, why not the Times. If I buy a Nook Book on my iPhone I can later get it for my Nook, my PC, or my Mac. Simple. Same with an audiobook from Audible or music from iTunes (in that case obviously I'm just moving the file around). Paying for stuff doesn't bother me. Honestly, while I'd prefer not to have it, DRM doesn't even bother me much as long as it isn't intrusive and allows me to activate multiple devices. Having to pay for the same content twice depending on where I'm looking at it... that annoys me.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
And you expect quality news to disappear? Really? There's more valuable content than ever right now, in spite of the fact that we've been hearing the same sob story for a decade now about how there's not enough money to be made from internet advertising.
People will, in general, pay for things if they 1., see a worth to it, and 2. they can't conveniently get it for free .
NYT's paywall isn't leaky by accident. They're trying to get subscription money from the people that are more likely to subscribe (the ones who actually go to the site and read a substantial portion of the paper) without losing the eyeballs of people who were never likely to subscribe but whose pageviews still bring in advertising dollars and search rankings.
In my op, part of the problem is the division on the 'net between the content makers (eg NY Times) and the content providers (Comcast). I feel that I already pay Comcast too much for web access, and now the Times is hoping I'll pay them on top of that? That's a tough sell, no matter what the content is.
People don't want to pay for what they consider they have already payed for, to the ISP. What would work is some kind of micro-payment system where the ISP adds the cost of access onto your bill and channeled payment upstream to the content provider.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there about a decade or so there where all the newspapers were fighting hard to have people go online to the free content on the website, which then started to have banner ads, and then pop-ups, and then pop-unders, and so on... it's the newspapers that devalued their own content, and they're just trying to blame it on everyone but themselves. See also: Recording industry watches the surge of online music spending when iTunes and etc hit, and instead of getting on board, they just tried to charge more for their own music. Surprise, sales of physical albums are down while more overall money is being spent online. I bet the same goes here- people probably pay more for news now (paid phone widgets and apps, etc) than they ever have, they just don't spend it on print media.
All you need to do to understand my distaste for the NYT is look at its history of inaccuracy. You might want to start with the Pulitzer Prize a NYT writer got for a series of articles "debunking" the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and going forward from there including such wonderful reporting as minimizing reporting on the Holocaust and Jayson Blair getting promoted for making up stories (until he got caught by someone outside of the NYT, when they fired him).
Personally, my attitude is that I favor those who favor individual rights vs opposing those who favor group rights/greater government power (both NPR and the NYT do the latter).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
For every site you have to pay to get something online, not just information, there's at least 10 more that will give it to you for free.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
The POINT of the internet is free, unhindered access to communication or information. If your business prior to the internet was selling information, you had better figure out a way to make money by giving the same information away for free or you will fail. There are thousands of companies already making staggering amounts of money this way... stop trying to do things your old stupid way, and start doing them the new smarter way. News agrigators pissing you off? Start agrigating the news your self. Team up with other papers, get smart.
IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet.
That may be true, unless you accept the possibility that mainstream news is little more than pure corporatist propaganda that has value to its owners that extends beyond the operating profits of the media outlet (i.e., the power to influence opinion is more valuable to the media owners than the outlet's operating profit). In that case, the real question is: does the loss of operating revenue in the Internet age make media outlets have to rely on 'selling influence' as their sole source of value?
If there was a news source that charged such fees that I *didn't* have to read with the same squint that citizens of the USSR used to read Pravda, I gladly pay for a subscription, but as someone who grew up with the NYT as the household newspaper, today's NYT does not even remotely approach that threshold.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
"(What nerve! Imagine if grocery stores, phone companies, or even employees began charging for their wares!)"
While the point is overall valid, this is quite a stretch.
Grocery Stores have to pay for each item. Each item has a cost. Then they add value by stocking it. You go in and select the item, and you pay for it, and whatever method you use for checking out incurs additional costs. This is on top of the price of land and construction and repairs- this is one actual thing, a peach or something, that is now GONE. The next person can't use that peach, because you are working on turning it into post-peach-poo.
Phone companies have all the infrastructure to worry about, and that's about it. This is a correct comparison, but the order of magnitude is off by quite a bit. Additionally, the phone companies are often subsidized by taxpayers.
An employee sells his time. I could take several jobs, but I can't work 25 hours in a day, ever.
The entire reason "information is free" is because propagating it has a very low cost. If everyone who viewed the NYT ended up paying a penny or two, this is an economic action that wouldn't add up very quickly on the end of the viewer, but WOULD add up quickly on the end of the content distributor (who may also be the producer of said content). Simply put, your costs are all infrastructure, and that's cheap compared to the phone company, and you serve a lot of customers per, uh, unit peach.
In any event, the cost of information is only marginally higher than its propagation cost- because you are propagating it to so many. The issue is that none of those people have the ability to pay any quantity lower than like 3 bucks, and that's just silly.
You make two fundamental flaws; equating web content to physical goods and assuming that a system designed for academic information sharing (that originally banned all commercial activity) is well suited as a business/retail platform.
Physical news papers have a significant cost to print and distribute, per user. One more viewer on a web site has a near-zero cost.
Many print magazines are virtually free as subscriptions often just cover the cost of distribution. Advertising pays for the production and printing.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
"But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing."
Not quite true...the Internet has devalued "news". News alone is no longer content. Opinion(reasoned) is content. Analysis is content. Editorial is content. The "who, what, where, when" of events are no longer valuable, but the "why" and "what's next" is still enormously valuable...possibly made more so by the horrific signal to noise ratio of the internet.
Do I have mod points? No. This is the single biggest reason I run noscript and adblock, folks. Making your page load thirty times faster by stripping out the crap I didn't request? Awesome. Preparing for bandwidth caps by eliminating most of the large binary blobs I download? That too. When you're paywalling three-meg flash ads, people will start resenting those shenanigans.
Blame editors/management for the crap we see, and for the increasing number of crap reporters, then blame the public for the _demand_ for Beibler/Lohan/Sheen crap resulting in the demand for brain-dead reporters. I've always been a Jeffersonian, but Hamilton was right.
Hello!!! Everbody can decide, if he wants to charge for access to his information or not. But free information is that, what's made the internet big. Imagine if there had not been geeks who thoght "hmm, this ins interesting..I want to share this...lets make a website".....internet would not be this big. But then business-economics folks came and said "free stuff is evil communists work....we want to get rid of it".....but they weren't successfull because everybody saw, that there is much better information available for free. Imagine all those websites, blogs, twitter and so on...If these people would not be so idealistic, the net would be another television channel, with overpriced crap. Then he mixes infrastructure access with information access...man, at this point it gets very nasty. Shure providers charge money...because I get stuff from them, like a box and a cable(and imagine...just for me..somebody else has another box!..he will not use mine, like information, which can be shared for free) , where the internet comes out...and on the other side there wave to be veeery long wires, so internet can come from everywhere in the world to MY house. But if the NYT pubhlishes an article, they dont need to write it especially for every user....hell, they don't even need to write it, if the article is in the newspaper as well (I think this their primary business model, but I am not shure...this article sounds like they will starve to death, just because they have a website).....so don't compare access providers with publishers! And if you read his article, he says that people should not be charged double if they have two 3G contracts for iPhone and iPad....huh?...Did I get something wrong, or did he just say, he wants someting free?!?!....here he totally mixes up mobile data plans and internet connection sharing at home...shure he has to pay twice....if he actually want to have double the value...If he does not want to pay double, he should use WiFi for his iPad, or put his iPhone SIM in his iPad......"but hell these blood-thirsty carriers charge two times, but there is only 1 internet, I don't understand...please help me I am clueless!!"...HELLO, IF YOU HAVE TWO CONTRACTS, YOU PAY TWICE, BUT YOU GET TWICE THE VALUE, NAMELY 2 TIMES THE DATA-VOLUME AND TWICE THE BANDWIDTH!! Man, I really should STOP reading slashdot....my heart attack risk would decrease significant!
I'd vaguely consider paying for really really good news and analysis -
But we need a heavily honest rating service that rates the content as useful.
A 7 page Economist article might get a 9 out of 10, while the ehow SEO'd stuff would be a 2.
Google is just starting to move in this direction re: their recent backlash against "content farms".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I do not agree. People will pay for great content. There is a lot of somewhat good content out there, but the source to backup the information they are trying to pass as fact can be close to non-existent. The New York Time is an indisputable source of well researched articles. I have never being a subscriber of any news paper, but I'm about to become one.
http://nyewin.org http://nyexug.com http://nycsqlusergroup.com http://nylug.org
The idea that the internet devalues content is interesting. It devalues redundant content. Because if I think X, and get paid 100k/year to write about it, someone else who also thinks X will give it away for free or less than I am charging. That doesn't mean the market for opinion X is limited, only that you don't need to necessarily have it from multiple places. The Chinese state press can report as well as the NYT that 7 bombs fell in tripoli on at whatever time.
The current system worked fine when print was mostly regional. Even the US market vs various european language markets etc. But the world of news and information has changed to one big international market. Where before the London version of the news probably said the same thing as the new york version, those were separate markets, now it's one market, and one fact. This means there is going to need to be consolidation, and print and TV are going to need to merge into a combined print (for however long it lasts), web, and TV content house, and there are going to be a lot less companies. I think this will probably kill a few of the UK and US companies (along with smaller ones like in Canada and australia), they will end up being the local reporting part of a bigger outfit.
Whether that killing off of companies is done through mergers or bankruptcy remains to be seen, but the NYT seems to be working very hard to tick off anyone who might be willing to give them money.
two cents: both The Economist and Consumer Reports have reasonable effective paywalls.
Economist: print subscription plus online is $70-100 per year
Consumer reports: $26/year
The difference: the price.
NY Times should drop the price.
The New York Times has taken a lot of heat for daring to start charging for its product.
Well yes, seeing as they haven't charged for it for the last century, it's no surprise that people would be upset by this sudden change.
Sure, they've charged for printing and distribution, but the cost to find and report the news has always been covered by advertising. You only paid to have it put on paper and delivered to you, which is a very expensive process. Online distribution, however, is practically free, and so naturally people would expect access to be as well.
The problem is...It encourages unpaid usage in massive quantities via Twitter and other feeds....
Apparently somebody has forgotten rather quickly that this is NOT the first time the New York Times has put up a paywall. The last time (a few years ago), they tried to limit sharing via twitter and other feeds. If I shared a link to a new york times article with my friends, or with readers of my blog, then they couldn't actually read it unless they paid for it. The result was exactly what you'd expect - people stopped linking to New York Times articles. People began to notice that virtually everything they wrote about had also been covered by somebody else who was happy to share it openly, and so the Times immediately became irrelevant as news source. They dropped that paywall very, very quickly.
At least this time around they're trying to fix that obvious error. But their business model is fundamentally flawed because they're still charging for news, and news is a commodity which is widely available for free elsewhere.
The problem here is that the news isn't their product. reader eyeballs are their product. free news is what they use to grow that product. they then sell that product to advertisers. mistaking
I read the NYT daily online. I wouldn't mind paying something nominal. That would be less than $5 a month. For the price of the cheapest plan, I will re-subscribe to a better paper, The Economist, and pay less to get better information (I only let my weekly subscription to the Economist lapse when I stopped spending three weeks a month on the road).
I don't need a daily paper, and I prefer the editorial and reporting of the Economist. They will score the win, and I will save my 20 articles a month for the Krugman, and Dowd editorial schedules.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
Paying for the privilege of shopping at a store?
Who would fall for such a thing?
I like microcars
I am assuming that readers of the NYT are more affluent than average and the people who read the paper on a daily basis might be willing to pay. The price might make sense for the demographic they are targeting.
To be the price makes no sense, even for the moderately wealthy. Did you ever read "The Millionaire Next Door"? Generally people who are well off are that way because they are somewhat frugal and paying so much for something they can get for free elsewhere will make little sense for them.
If you build an online news site targeting only those with huge trust funds, I submit you will fail unless you charge 100k per year. Of course then you will fail too but for different reasons.
The NYT wants millions to sign on but is charging a price that guarantees only thousands will (being the NYT, perhaps tens of thousands).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
* Subsistence (taking from the environment)
* Pollution (putting back to the land in a harmful way)
* Gift giving (to individuals or a group, like free software and personal blogging, or the environment at an improvement)
* Theft (compelling as an individual)
* Planning authority (compels action by force or reasonable persuasion usually from above to some purportedly good social end)
* Exchange (non-compelled interchange)
The balance of all these changes depending on the technology and culture. We are seeing the balance change as the internet makes possible stigmergic cooperation on a huge scale (like Wikipedia and GNU/Linux).
Using a paywall and copyright laws backed ultimately by state violence to create "artificial scarcity" to force an exchange for otherwise easily copied goods is just a more and more problematical business model in an age more and more dominated by subsistence, gift giving, and planning. This is especially problematical when copyrights have been extended to be effectively infinite, when in the age of the pony express and sailing ships they were about twenty years, since if anything, they should be shorter now by the logic of faster times to recoup investments in fast moving media. So, the old social bargain for copyright feels like it has been broken by the publishers (see Richard Stallman for more on the social bargain issue).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/misinterpreting-copyright.html
If we had twenty year copyright (or much less) so much would be in the public domain we would have a much freer society and creators would have a lot more in the public domain to draw from. One way to get there would be to put an annual tax on all copyrights as some small percentage of what owners say they are worth (where anyone could buy the copyright into the public domain for that full amount).
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
i'd feel better paying for news if i wasn't convinced that the information coming to me was filtered through a pro-institutional lens aimed at preventing democracy from having meaningful outcomes for the average citizen. when i read a newspaper now, i feel like i'm watching a football post-game analysis in which man on the street is neither a participant in what is happening or in the discussion itself; this is just a source of frustration and alienation, and not something i would pay for.
let's hope ./ is going paywall soon.
The NYT is pap spun out by "reporters" who these days are little more than stenographers in the propaganda machine that is the main-stream media. Why anyone would pay for this crap is beyond me. The only reason I ever look at the NYT is to see what lies that pass for conventional knowledge are being propagated by the shills.
..then why do people keep on creating?
Yes, the Internet is a disruptive technology. No, society as we know it will not cease to exist.
So here's an idea. Is it too far-fetched to provide the major sections of the NYT (or any major newspaper) on an a la carte basis? For example, I only read the business and sports section and could give a crap about the rest of the newspaper, but as it is, I'm paying for something I'm never going to read.
I don't care one way or the other if they use a paywall or not, but the characterization of the company as starting to charge for its "product" is ludicrous.
The New York Times is a newspaper company. Newspaper companies do not sell newspapers--those aren't the "products" that they charge for. Newspaper companies sell eyeballs. They use various techniques to attract readers, but most especially to attract subscribers. Then they sell the eyeballs of their subscribers to advertisers. That was the business model for newspapers that got them profit margins of over 20% in the 1970s and 80s.
Many internet sites essentially use the same business model. However, the profit margins aren't quite the same, and advertising can't keep up with expenses.
Making people pay to read or buy the newspaper has always just been a cost-defraying measure, not a profit-creation measure.
I just found out our local TV station broadcasts the evening news for free. That will never work.