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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."
Reporters need to eat, though.
Reporters need to eat, though.
The reporters I've known used to eat and drink an awful lot on their expense accounts.
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
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.
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.
Except that's not true. You can go quite far by dispatching reporters to the scene of breaking news, but you really need somebody at the capital every day that congress is in session and somebody just hanging out at the various town halls of major cities in case something happens. And that isn't cheap, but if you don't do it, you're going to miss important stories on a fairly regular basis.
Additionally, a lot of stories only come to light because of the competitive nature of the industry wanting to beat everybody else to the story so as to have something to rub their nose in.
However, then the Reporters are wary of doing any reporting of anything negative of the sponsors.
Why Top Gear America will never gain traction like Top Gear UK (aside from the hosts sucking). They simply can't be critical of car companies in the same way without the car companies threatening to pull advertisements for the entire network.
...like Top Gear UK...
Which is, incidentally, the best TV show...[long pause]...in the world.
Sometimes I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and practice my Clarkson-in-the-world voice. Other people do that too, right?
Yes, but what is it really worth to you for that, and how many places will you go to to pay on a recurring basis for the news? Just processing and dispute resolution can easily suck up $5-$10 a month on an account. How many of those sites are you going to pony up for? If a large scale micropayment system existed, it might work, but there are still a lot of content creators or managers who feel that the smallest discrete chunk of material is worth $1-$2. That is, of course, unsustainable if you want people to read it every day. In that case, maybe $10 a month sounds reasonable. But if you read news from half a dozen or more sources, you're looking at a very large monthly outlay.
On the flip side, it's been shown time and again that any population interested enough in a content pool to return on a regular basis for access also has a good demographic base for advertising. It will end up with advertising eventually, and you'll still be paying. And advertisers have the advantage of being a single source for collecting revenue. It's easy to charge them 1-10c/article, because you can guarantee you'll be getting them for 100,000 hits a month - much easier than tracking 100,000 individual accounts.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Exactly. Not every newsworthy item is quite as obvious as an island destroying tsunami. And even for big events, the best reporting is going to be done by people that have been on the ground, understand the issues, people, politics, geography and the myriad of other details that separates good reporting from Fox News. NYT does have articles like that. It does have reporters on the ground. And that costs lots of money.
I had actually planned on getting a subscription, but I rather doubt I will unless they change it. They're charging for an premium product, but not really delivering. The separate charges for different devices is incredibly stupid. I rather suspect (since they have yet to mention it) that it will contain advertising. And I'm sorry, the NYT has pretty annoying stop action/ overly gaudy / overly large / Flash ads (when I turn off ad block, that is). And NYT breaks every browser that I've ever used (albeit with NoScript and Adblock).
Maybe they will see the light, but I rather doubt it. I suspect that they will call it a success for a while then either collapse or change something.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
How many reporters do you know? I happen to know one or two writers for the NYT that make a pittance of a salary. Yes, they get reasonable expense accounts. Most journalists in this country would be lucky to have *that*.
And why do they get expense accounts? Why does anyone in any industry get an expense account? For one thing, it enables (in principle) the worker to perform their job better than they otherwise might. For a journalist, it's the opportunity to meet people over drinks and lunch, make connections, learn about things. You may consider this superfluous, but there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for journalism that realize it isn't.
Second, the accounts are a perk, yes. And why shouldn't they be? News and journalism works in free-markets like everything else. In every sector, you have people who do mediocre work, bad work, good work, and amazing work. Companies and markets strive to compensate them accordingly. So if you're a top tier journalist, who's to say a company shouldn't offer you an expense account to do your job? You can argue again that it's a waste, but you'd better toe the same line when it comes to every other business sector under the sun.
Journalists, editors, publishers, all are individuals who do potentially rough work (not in every case, but in some) that serves broader society in a way that is both practically relevant and creatively compelling. They deserve to be compensated, compensated well in some some cases, and not just by someone looking to make a buck off an ad placement on a blog.