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New York Times Halves Monthly Free Article Views To Ten

Posted by Unknown on from the nine-after-reading-this dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times has announced that, starting in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will only be able to access 10 free articles a month, down from 20 articles currently. The NYTimes paywall was put into effect last year, and seems to have been a success, with nearly half a million digital subscriptions to all of Times Co.'s websites; this despite the fact that the paywall is trivial to circumvent (for example, by deleting all cookies from nytimes.com)." The submitter included a link to the WSJ article on the change, which appears to also be paywalled.

24 of 178 comments (clear)

  1. Oh Well by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's their site, and their content, and they can decide who gets how much for free. If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else or buy a subscription. This is how the market is supposed to work.

    1. Re:Oh Well by nospam007 · · Score: 5, Informative

      "If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else or buy a subscription. This is how the market is supposed to work."

      Or they could just delete the cookie and read on.

    2. Re:Oh Well by Hadlock · · Score: 5, Informative

      I just open all NYT and WSJ articles in "incognito mode" or whatever it's called on your favorite browser.
       
      I like to think of it as a game, where you lose one life each time you accidentally click on an article without opening it in incognito mode. If you lose all 10 lives, you "lose" the game and can't read good journalism for the remainder of the month.

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
    3. Re:Oh Well by khr · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, it's working. I pay for it, not because I can't get around the paywall, but because they provide a product I think is worth the money.

    4. Re:Oh Well by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh noes! Now reading without permission is stealing! By the way, if you're reading this, then you have agreed to my terms of $0.01 per glance. I think you'll agree, with insightful comments such as mine you're getting one heck of a deal!

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    5. Re:Oh Well by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Funny

      I pay for it, not because I can't get around the paywall, but because they provide a product I think is worth the money.

      Hey, man, you're ruining this thread's neocommunist vibe.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    6. Re:Oh Well by IMightB · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's actually pretty amazing to change your agent string to googlebot and see what opens up for you. For example, all those tech sites that want you to sign up to get an answer suddenly become wide open.

    7. Re:Oh Well by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't pay for it because, while I think the Times' reporting is top-notch, the print side has too much power and keeps the digital version artificially high to prevent poaching. The Kindle version is $20/month and is totally gimped and does not include digital access. Meanwhile the dead-tree edition is about $30/month and comes with unlimited digital access. You can get the dead-tree edition weekday-only for the same price as the Kindle version, and that also includes unlimited digital access.

      But this is the best part: just digital access, no Kindle, no dead-tree is... $8.75/week! Yes, $38/month for less product than the dead tree edition. The mind boggles. I refuse to pile up a bunch of unused newspapers just to save $18/month for digital access, so they can pound sand.

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    8. Re:Oh Well by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's the big problem though. What constitutes a "read", and how do they really track it? Simply clicking on a link to an article shouldn't really count as a read, as you could denial-of-service a whole bunch of people simply by sending them to a page with a bunch of iframes. It doesn't even fit with how many people use the internet, where they will open 15 links in different tabs, gloss over the first paragraph, decide the rest isn't worth reading and close the tab.

      I know the old exception is quite easy. You could go to NYTimes.com and read 20 articles a month there.

      Linked articles from blogs don't count, and neither do articles linked from search engines. The reasoning for this is simple - blogs and search engines bring in viewers. If they stay, they can read 20 more (or 10 now) articles for free on the main site.

      Basically, occasional readers (those who read via blogs and such) aren't subject to much paywalling at all.

      And that's why the NYTimes paywall is a success where other paywalls failed.

      Other paywalls let you read a paragraph or two before demanding payment. NYTimes lets you read the rest for free. If you like it, you may read more until you hit your limit. But you won't hit your limit if you only read NYTimes via another website.

      There are enough ways to bypass the paywall that those who really wanted to could (basically by googling the headline and clicking that way), but most people are lazy and having to google to read another article gets old fast.

      Basically, NYTimes found a way to get its articles read (via blogs and news aggregators like Google) but still being able to get some money from those who like it enough to read it (by not offering it entirely for free). So it doesn't matter how many times NYTimes articles appear in say, /. since they don't count. But those who wanted to read the NYTimes for free by using its website is blocked.

      Pretty brilliant, actually. Blogs and aggregators bring people in, and you only charge them if they stay. First hit's free.

  2. And? by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's working for them, that's actually pretty cool. Those who want it pay or circumvent; those who don't move on to other options. '

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the way it's supposed to work?

    1. Re:And? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's working for them, that's actually pretty cool. Those who want it pay or circumvent; those who don't move on to other options. '
      Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the way it's supposed to work?

      It is. But the larger question is, can this model be useful for everybody. You must remember how a lot of people were (and are) of the opinion that this won't work in the long term. NYT has been kind of pigheaded about this... and it's apparently working. For them.

      So... can anybody copying this can expect the same? Is there a formula that can tell us with some precision, how many of your readers you can expect to retain if you implement a paywall? That's the interesting part.

    2. Re:And? by thePowerOfGrayskull · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It will work for anybody in a similar position: producing a lot of content that people want to read, and are willing to pay to do so. Since NYT is unlikely to release detailed numbers, the only formula is trial and error to find the right balance between alienating customers and attracting them. (And this move indicates that they're still refining that balance.)

  3. "trivial to circumvent" by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    you realize that for most people deleting cookies only from nytimes.com is technically challenging

    and even if it isn't, the hassle factor is enough to move people to buy

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
    1. Re:"trivial to circumvent" by Sir_Sri · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And the point is a polite reminder that they can't get enough advertising to cover the cost of the content you want, so if you want the content you should pay them.

      There are a lot of ways around the paywall. I don't think they are deeply serious about making it half free, half subscription, because people who don't want to pay really won't, and they may come up with a relatively bad scheme to make the NYT involuntarily free if they can't simply circumvent it. I'd rather those who know just delete cookies, than start doing a daily/hourly torrent dump of my website or something. If you annoy pirates enough they'll come up with such and easy way to pirate that no one will ever pay. The NYT seems to have fairly successfully (for the moment) found a middle ground between getting people to pay, while giving away content to those who absolutely wouldn't pay anyway.

    2. Re:"trivial to circumvent" by Stewie241 · · Score: 3, Funny

      I just feel sorry for the poor information that just so desperately wants to be free but is destined to live its life trapped behind a paywall.

  4. Good: the writers get paid. by concealment · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm glad the NYT has found a way to get money for its content. Internet advertising is slowly being recognized as bunk because most of the people spending a lot of time on the internet are not going to buy anything. They're usually retired, young, or unemployed. As a result, the writers aren't going to get paid if the newspaper relies on advertising, and this means that there will be less quality writing for the rest of us. It's better to pay for something and have it be of a higher quality.

    The real travesty is that they paid $40 million for that goofball paywall.

  5. Get Over It Already by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I pay almost zero attention to east coast media; mostly because they don't pay any attention to the west coast (except for Hollywood).

    Yeah and us midwest coast people that read The Star Tribune? We should just totally ignore everything that's happening on the West and East coasts because attention isn't focused on us, the reader, one hundred percent of the time? I shouldn't partake in the enjoyment of the New York Times' excellent book reviews or international coverage because none of those happen to be about me where I live? I shouldn't read the LA Times because even though their 1992 riot coverage won them a Pulitzer, they didn't cover the riots that followed my college hockey team's national championship loss?

    Seriously, this East coast/West coast bullshit has got to stop. Get over yourselves and appreciate good news with good factchecking and a budget to send your reporters to be first hand sources.

    --
    My work here is dung.
    1. Re:Get Over It Already by Gilmoure · · Score: 3, Informative

      Everyone's too polite in Canada to make news.

      --
      I drank what? -- Socrates
    2. Re:Get Over It Already by theNAM666 · · Score: 3, Funny

      >believe that despite his ravaging where we live with tornados on a yearly basis, we've got a direct line to God.

      If most of the people in the South called me on a daily basis, and I had tornado powers, I'd smite them too.

  6. So maybe by Compaqt · · Score: 4, Funny

    Slashdot should post half as many links to NyTimes.com per month?

    --
    I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
  7. Can't RTFA by tepples · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If people don't like it they can get their news somewhere else

    How many NYTimes.com articles does Slashdot link to per month? Expect a bunch of "can't RTFA" comments that until now had been reserved for the major scholarly journals and WSJ.

  8. 500,000 subscribers by ledow · · Score: 3, Interesting

    According to a quick Google:

    Half a million PAYING subscribers is in line with the number of people with an Iridium satellite phone, the number of people who use MuveMusic on their smartphone, or the number of people who pay to play Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, etc.

    I.e. statistically insignificant, especially if you only count the US. I can't name anyone in the above groups, for example, and it's the amount of people Spotify attract in just two months.

    I can't remember the last time I saw an NYT article (despite, a few years ago, coming across them all the time online). I certainly can't remember the last time I tried to "bypass" anything to see a website like that. Or the last time I subscribed to any website (I did have a subscription to LWN.net - and Slashdot - at one point but more as a donation to them than providing any benefit to me).

    Hell, the last time I actually bought a paper, there *wasn't* a decent online version of any UK paper (but I was still getting all my news from the Internet), and the paper wasn't even for me.

    You can try singing about your paywall all you like but the more restrictions you put on non-paywall activities, the more it confirms my suspicion - they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers, if they aren't already dying. If they were happy and comfortable and making lots of profit, they wouldn't care about the article limit, or they'd raise it, or they'd have "free" versions and "premium" versions and not have to crowbar you into the premium version all the time.

    My granddad's generation - who took whatever news was fed to them - would probably be that loyal to a paper, or even a political party, without thinking. Nowadays? If you don't put your news online where I can see it, it won't get seen.

  9. The question I have is... by pdboddy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you are a paying subscriber, do they remove the ads?

    --
    Julie Moult is an idiot.
  10. Cost of print subscription cheaper than digital? by Sir+Homer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Am I reading this wrong? It seems that the cost of a print subscription is $3.85 a week but INCLUDES the $35/mo (holy crap that's expensive) digital subscription.

    It kind of baffles me 500,000 people paying as much as ISP service for access to a single newpaper? Are they including print subscriptions in that number