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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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