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."
Yet another story that shows that a /. reader/commenter does not represent the typical customer of a major news outlet.
Care to back that up with some facts?
Aside the few clowns on /. it is a highly literate audience - which is what the NYT caters to.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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!
Anywho, I can access NYT articles with no problem from both work and home. Am I missing something here?
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.
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
Funny how the extremes of Left and Right both end up in exactly the same place: Totalitarianism. Maybe Left and Right aren't very accurate labels.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Real news coverage is about depth much more than timeliness. I'd much rather have in-depth analysis of say, a proposed law, in a week or two than fluff in 6 hours.
TODO: Something witty here...
Slashdot overall actually has about every opinion possible. Some of the most loved (ie - highly moderated) opinions turn out to be as wrong as they could possibly be.
Consider this gem, particularly "If Apple enters that market with a phone, they're fucked". Fucked with finding warehouse space to store pallets of money, as it turns out.
Though there were plenty of opinions contrary to that one the groupthink doesn't often push them to the top.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
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 costs barley cover wha it take to get the newspaper to you.
If you remove the delivery charge and printing costs, you would think it would be free w/ Advertising, or cost with no/ advertising. Not both.
Plus my newspapers ads don't move, flash, bing , ding, blink or honk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I got it for free on my ipad
No, you didn't. It was paid for by the outrageous markup you turned your head and coughed up for having PHB decide what you can and cannot run on hardware for which you were way overcharged.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
...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.
Then you want to read The Economist. Look around for a few minutes and be impressed that such a high-level newspaper exists. Despite its name, it does not deal with mostly economics. It's more for international politics and major world events.
It's interesting to read magazines like The Economist six months or so after they're published. You quickly get a feel for what's worth getting curious, outraged, or excited about, and what's not. Anything that's still important and relevant after six months is worth further consideration.
Obviously that approach doesn't scale all the way down to local news media, unless you want to wake up to the sound of bulldozers in your front yard. But on a national/international level, it saves a lot of time and angst.