New York Times Halves Monthly Free Article Views To Ten

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.

Comments

Oh Well

[WrongSizeGlass]

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.

Re:Oh Well

[nospam007]

"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.

Re:Oh Well

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:Oh Well

[khr]

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.

Re:Oh Well

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

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!

Re:Oh Well

[IMightB]

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.

"trivial to circumvent"

[circletimessquare]

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

Get Over It Already

[eldavojohn]

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.

So maybe

[Compaqt]

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

Re:And?

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

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.)