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NY Times to go metered usage (20 free articles a month)

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Started 1 year ago by cc
Latest reply from myliftkk

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cc

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Thursday morning, executives at The New York Times announced they believe they have found the right formula and the right moment to do the seemingly impossible: get people to pay for online news.

http://www.npr.org/2011/03/17/134621239/new-york-times-unveils-metered-online-paywall

my take:

With Amazon selling more digital books than paperback and the growing prevelance of e-readers (kindle,nook, ipad, etc) I think they are seeing digital subscriptions as more of a possibility/necessity. I also think that their older base readership will gravitate toward e-readers as their eyesight worsens with age (ie they can make everything large fonts).

Posted 1 year ago #
joev
Merion Village
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I read the New York Times online a lot. I really value the content. But I'm sure I'm not going to pay to read past the 20 articles a month - even if it's only a couple of bucks. I completely understand that they need to make money, but I'm too accustomed to high quality content that's supported by ads.

The Economist has done a similar thing (five articles free a month) but from what I can tell, they've quietly backed off, as I have rarely hit that paywall over the past month.

Posted 1 year ago #
rus

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There's also reading articles from search engines, creating links from facebook, etc... figure a lot of people will either read something else or find a way around it.

Posted 1 year ago #
JonMyers
HCMC ✈
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I read and value the NYT's and I'm sure I'll go past the 20 article limit, but I doubt I will pay for what I view as commodity content. Is the Time's take on the Japan disaster or Libya that much different than what's already out there? No.

If I were going to pay for digital commodity content it probably wouldn't be from the Times.

Posted 1 year ago #
billiejean

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I'm not a big NY times fan, NPR all the way :D

Plus WSJ is awesome.

Posted 1 year ago #
Bear
The woods
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The price is actually not too unreasonable, unlike that of the New Yorker/CondÃƒÂ© Nast pubs, which make you pay considerably more for the electronic edition than for the paper one. It sounds like they're asking for about 50Ã‚Â¢ a day.

I'll be curious to see how it interacts with the iPhone and iPad apps. The NYT iPad app is so impressive that I actually much prefer it to a physical paper.

JonMyers wrote >>
I read and value the NYT's and I'm sure I'll go past the 20 article limit, but I doubt I will pay for what I view as commodity content. Is the Time's take on the Japan disaster or Libya that much different than what's already out there? No.

Depends on your area of interest, I suppose. Kristof's work on Darfur in the mid-2000s was pretty outstanding, I thought; Michiko Kakutani is pretty consistently interesting; they've brought on Nate Silver, who's a serious egghead but can talk to a nontechnical audience... if they'd just can Maureen Dowd they'd be firing on all cylinders.

ETA: That said, at the moment it sounds like you can spoof the URL (add referer=twitter.com) and get around the paywall....

Posted 1 year ago #
Lorence
Westgate
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See: http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/Attacking_The_Firewall/

He tried out the NYTClean bookmarklet (http://euri.ca/2011/03/21/get-around-new-york-times-20-article-limit/) and "the $40 million paywall comes tumbling down..."

Posted 1 year ago #
myliftkk
Columbus, OH
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Too many more of their premiere columnists leave and no one will even bother to scale the new paywall.

Posted 1 year ago #