Slashdot Mirror
Paywalled NYT Now Has 300,000 Online Subscribers
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like the derided-on-slashdot paywall for the NY Times hasn't brought down the paper so far. The Times now reports 300,000 digital subscribers (to e-reader versions and the web combined) and digital advertising revenue for the part of the company that includes the paper has increased 6% this quarter."
Ipad owners :)
On a long enough timeline. The survival rate for everyone drops to zero. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, 1996
This just in: Slashdot is often wrong about things like this. The same way neither the iPhone or iPad failed.
Yet another story that shows that a /. reader/commenter does not represent the typical customer of a major news outlet.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
In your address bar just delete the junk following the .html (or in some cases folowing the trailing slash) and then reload.
Keep in mind that every print subscriber gets a free top-of-the-line digital subscription. Its actually cheaper to get the paper edition and recycle it then it is to just get the online, in fact, which is annoyingly stupid.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
In recent months I've seen a lot of news sources citing the NYT as a source, particularly where actual research was concerned. While I was one of the many that denounced the paywall move, I'm reasonable enough to admit I was wrong.
Double counting anyone?
Compared to even obscure little slashdot.
Honestly, they should be over 1,000,000 already if they were to be as successful as they claimed to be. and how much you want to bet they are counting the paper subscribers that logged in to set up their online account, so the real number is far lower.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Anywho, I can access NYT articles with no problem from both work and home. Am I missing something here?
Is 300k subscribers good? What percentage of total online readers is that? Also, sure, a 6% increase in digital advertising revenue is good, in that any increase is good. But what sort of increase did comparable websites see?
Over all, I think they've handling this well. I just wish they would display the number of views remaining where it greats me every day with the phrase "Welcome, ohsupremeleader".
Actually, my NYT user name is from the Slartibartfast school of almost filthy. Refer to someone that way in the joint, they'd carry you out in a box. It combines the adolescent directness of fartface with the oozitude of sloppy seconds. I guess I was none too thrilled about the mandatory sign-up.
But honestly, they have pretty good content, and deserve to stay in business.
must be in a cookie somewhere
The NYT is biased lefty trash.
I knew this would happen.
It is cheap enough and common enough to the readers that they were willing to fork over such a small, completely disposable, income towards hopefully more quality, even if there are more reporting groups out there who are completely free.
People find more quality in things they pay for, even if it is cheap. (well, generally)
As I have said a few times in the past though, having a mix of free and premium services is always the best idea.
Premium services could have things such as preview articles, first view at the hopefully more exclusives, discounts for longer subscriptions, priority commenting, more priority in bandwidth on the servers, exclusive "top" discussion section for subscribers to weed out typical "youtube" levels of idiocy, and countless other ideas you can think of.
I can see this happening more in the future since these numbers are coming out. I'm quite surprised they posted it, in fact, since it gives incentive for more people to do this as well.
Freemium services, while ideal, are becoming harder to operate since advertisers have abused their positions and more and more people block them all regardless of content or decency, even though there are decent advertisers out there. (and as you remember this caused a huge argument over allowing advertisers to flag their site as "honest" wrt advertising and threats of forking extensions and so on...)
The only advertisers I block are people who abuse the hell out of Flash and GIFs... or those who still use pop-ups... seriously why?! (and that is by proxies so it is global, since I tend to use several browsers at the same time due to web development)
It is also in part due to site operators also abusing ads by having them absolutely everywhere too.
Maybe I'm cheap but I just clear my cookies to get another 20 free articles a month.
I'm glad to see the NY Times is able to make some good revenue off their site, but this probably only works for the larger papers.
Large influential papers like the NY Times and Wall St. Journal have a certain level of clout and original content that people are willing to pay for. It's highly unlikely that your local newspaper is going to make any reasonable amount of money off of creating a paywall. Most local papers feature largely wire stories you can find online from thousands of other papers. More circumstantial -- but it's also been my observation that the "younger generations" increasingly don't care about local interest stories or Prep Sports that may be in the local papers -- which is usually the only original content they offer.
So in the long run, I can see this saving a handful of the largest national papers, but I feel most local papers will be in even more trouble in the future.
LOL. All you have to do to get around the pay wall is to delete the cookie they send over or just block it using no-script. Works like a charm every time. I will not pay for something they make obviously simple to get around.
I wonder how effective these paywalls would be if more people realized you can simply clear your cookies to bypass it.
It isn't a paywall, it is a payrope. You can just wander right over it (without any underhand tactics). I have been a reader before and after (5-10 articles per day) and have not noticed any difference. I don't know what the article cut-off is, but unless you plan to read the thing cover-to-cover every day you aren't going to notice. I suspect a lot of the 300k subscriptions come from ipads and kindles, because I can't see how it would be easy to get value for money from a PC subscription.
/. crowd say will fail). The NYT payrope is a sensible hybrid model, that finds enough people (willing or stupid depending on your prerogative) to pay, while the rest go free. Now if we get figures on The Times of London's subscriber figures (blanket solid paywall) then I suspect they would be a lot more in-keeping with the /. predictions.
Paywalls block all content, and are flawed (and are what the
I was surprised to find out that they still show advertising to paid subscribers, in particular annoying Flash based advertising.
Luckily there is Adblock.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
I have struggled mightily to resist paying the high rate and absurd model (pay more for access on the ipad? Seriously?) that the Times charges. I've tried to find other news sources that compare in depth, editorial insight, and quality independent reporting. Everything I've used to date has been half as good at best. I haven't caved yet, but I can see it coming on the horizon...
Nobody on slashdot would care about stupid paywall sites if you would do the most basic of editing tasks and stop linking to them.
The article says they don't included the 100,000 Ford Motor gave away for free. Nor does that number included the 800,00 paper delivery people that got it for free. Considering that they about 35 million homes get paper deliver, that means over 34 million people get the paper delivery and REFUSED the electronic one.
OK, so 900,000 people got it for free and 324,000 people to actually buy? Out of a potential market of 35 million people? If you give away 9 to get 3 people out of every 350 to buy your product, it is a failure.
The real problem is they don't know what a success is.
I would really like to know how many of their 324,000 paid electronic subscribers are actual individuals living in America, as opposed to libraries, colleges, and people living outside of the US.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Incognito mode FTW.
They are no doubt bolstering that number with a limited time promotion.
For years I accessed their content on the iPhone and web. Their content is first class but then they demanded $45/month for all devices (including iPad). I found other avenues - no big deal. I did miss it on the iApple devices but nothing earth shattering.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, they advertised $0.99 for full access for two months. Not bad, I think their content is good enough I would pay something for it, but as the old joke goes: we're just negotiating the price. This has the side effect (they they're counting on) of inflating their numbers to no doubt set their advertising rate.
When the special is gone, so am I.
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
...are idiots.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Just use Safari's "Reader" function. It extracts the actual article from behind the paywall overlay and makes it easily readable. I don't know how long they'll leave that vulnerability there though, so enjoy it while it lasts.
Meanwhile, Ray William Johnson has easily 10x that many subscribers on Facebook.
300,000 idiots ... the NYT offers nothing that can't be found elsewhere for free.
I'm a paid subscriber. I thought I could put up with their free limit, but it turns out that I am an avid reader of the NY Times. So I bought a subscription - I figured that I didn't have a problem paying for something that I truly valued.
People who boast about how they're cheating the system are doing nobody any favours. If you like it, please pay for it.
nyt-m
I figured it would go like this, but I had a serious problem with the timing of everything. They opened this paywall in the same month that two of their best and most vituperative anti-establishmentarian writers -- Frank Rich and Bob Herbert -- "left" the NYT. It was a very strange coincidence, as if perfectly timed to bring the corporate and well-heeled safely over without fear of seeing their agenda keelhauled several times a week. All that remains is the Nobel winner Krugman, who is as bulletproof as it gets in that kind of culture.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
300k people don't know how to delete cookies.
300.000 subscribers? Which is how many times the number of subscribers they have on their dying dead tree edition?
In this age, you wouldn't call a car salesman successful, if he only sells twice as many cars as he sells horse drawn carriages. Neither is a digital subscription model successful, if it only sells twice as many subscriptions as the dead tree edition.
to cover the 1%, doesn't it?
I'm glad they have enough paying subscribers because I like reading the NYT .
To avoid the article quota of 20, 1] sign up for their daily email and link to articles from it for no count and 2] use google news links with no count