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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!
Reporters need to eat, though.
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.
You find me a decent reporter and I just may pay for a bit of news. The main stream is so full of sensationalist crap, it is no longer fit for purpose.
You read things like "Tokyo's drinking water is 10,000 times above normal radiation levels". Then you look into the numbers and see that the amount is so tiny, you'd have to drink yourself to death just to get a radioactive blip.
I say fuck em... It is not a pay wall. It is a wall to protect me from them.
If you have any data / news for the surrounding lands of the Fukushima power plant please let me know.
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.
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
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?
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.
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
Most likely what podunk news will become is this:
a: is the uncensored official record from the town clerk searchable and indexed well. All the official statements and speeches and everything on the record.
b: an official summary by the mayor, firechief, police chief, etc... or their appointed press people.
c: blogger / critics. The guy who lost for mayor but goes to all the town council meetings, along with good disucssion.
Now I ask you doesn't that sound a heck of a lot more informative than the podunk local newspaper.
News and journalism works in free-markets like everything else
But you do not want them to:
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
A free market system does not pay what is deserved, it pays for what there is demand.
At the moment there demand is falling as consumers switch to free alternatives.
People are quite happy to pay if the product is worth it: the Financial Times, The Economist, The New Scientist etc. have no problem getting people to pay because they have content that does not have a suitable free alternative, because they actually have a high quality product that is hard replace.
Most newspapers do little investigative journalism, and largely reproduce press releases, government announcements, and whatever else they are fed. The net lets us bypass them and read the original.