Up goes the wall: New York Times banks on reading quotas
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We have reached a significant milestone in the experiment of erecting paywalls around news content, with the announcement by The New York Times that, starting today with a Canada-based rollout then progressing quickly to the rest of the world, it will charge readers to read the paper online. The move is significant for several reasons, perhaps most of all because of the way in which the paywalls have been structured. There are several different packages, all priced so as to encourage readers to make the shift to reading online. This is the shift created by the conviction that tablet readers will become mainstream, and the hope that advertisers will pay a premium on this new delivery mechanism. The world’s newspaper companies are now actively hastening the decline of print, because of the high cost of printing on, then trucking dead trees around the distribution area. The other interesting thing is that there will be holes in the paywall. The NYT is trying to be part of the social media conversation AND get revenue from its most loyal readers. First, the NYT is the US’s largest local metropolitan publication and a quality newspaper with global reach. The question everyone — from The Australian (whose delivery on its promise to erect paywalls seems endlessly and significantly delayed) and Fairfax publications in Australia, to news organisations across the world — wants answered is whether readers will pay for general news content. Given its quality and the special place the NYT has in the hearts and minds of its readers, it is well placed to find the answer. Therefore it is also significant and interesting that the pitch from publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger jnr is not about whizzbang new features or reader experience. The benefit he is offering is the continuation of the NYT as a news organisation. “It is an important step we hope you will see as an investment in the Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform.” But do readers really love journalism that much? Do they buy the view that it is essential to the good life? The companion question to whether readers will pay for online news is, how good does that content have to be in order to be worth paying for? David Winer makes the point that the NYT might have done better to actually offer something new:
Now to the structure of the deals. They are almost as complicated as a mobile phone plan, but with prices from $15 to $35 a month for a digital subscription to a paper that sells on the street for $2 a day and $5 on Sundays, there is a clear push to persuade readers to move online. This is resonant with the push at Fairfax to wind down the printing presses, deliberately trying to have smaller print runs, with all the distribution and printing costs that entails, and get readers to move to tablets. Printing and distribution accounts for up to three quarters of a newspaper’s costs. Then there are the holes in the paywall. Those who find NYT content through search engines will not be charged. This is nearly half the paper’s traffic. The NYT does not want to be in a walled garden with no gates. It wants to be part of the conversation. But, read the fine print, and you will see there are safeguards against people using Google and other search engines to game the system. If people try to access more than five NYT articles a day through Google, then they will be asked to pay. One has to ask whether anyone will really be so motivated to game the system without also being prepared to pay. But of course some people will do anything to get something for free. “Light” readers of NYT content will also escape the paywall. Vistors to the site can get up to 20 free articles a month before they will be asked to pay. All this amounts to a sophisticated and clearly finely judged approach to the paywall — a more complex and nuanced approach than we have seen elsewhere. Which does not mean that it will necessarily work. Predictions of doom and destruction are already circulating on the net. Truth is nobody knows whether or not this will work, but we do all know that the future lies in bold experimentation. This one will be closely watched, including by The Australian. |
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14 Comments
The ‘4 week’ subscription is somewhat bizarre, and charging extra for the mobiles and iPad version defies common sense : it should be CHEAPER in order to push adaptation.
People may have finally worked out that if you read the govt’s press releases, you dont need to pay for reprints in these establishment publications. You can go independepent and self funded for an approximation of the truth. I hope these MSM guys with their talking head shills all start charging a lot real soon. It may wake up the mind controlled masses from the left - right paradream.
If is anything like “The Australian” subscription it is going to struggle. I recently bought an IPad and briefly thought about loading the Oz app. Then I read the reviews under the app. Very strong against with most saying they would not be renewing. The main complaint being price hikes and increasingly intrusive advertisements.
I guess they will get an initial spike with giveaways but it will be interesting to see how it goes when the subscription renewals come around.
It’s a long time since the NYT was a “quality” newspaper - it will not be missed.
Its deception over “Raymond James” demonstrates that it is a government tool rather than a part of the information business.
#Richard Wilson put it well - if you want to read government propaganda and spin just go directly, it’s free
Richard Wilson and Julian Smith are both on the mark.
The ‘paper of record’ is merely the most prominent of the U.S. nationwide array of Establishment rags. It may reasonably be described as ‘American Pravda’. If one wants something other than the government/Establishment line on anything that matters, one either has to go to international sources (if free content is required) like Al Jazeera or pay a fee to one of the quality publications (such as Z Magazine).
Does anyone here know when Rupert is going to start charging for all the news.com.au sites? I am very much looking forward to that day.
I really liked The Age iPad edition, and enjoyed the 30 day trial. I also took up a trial to Crikey. On exactly the same day my Age iPad subscription was due for the first time Crikey had a special subscription offer too.
The Age was $18 per 4 weeks ($234 per year), for $20/4wks I could get the actual paper edition for 4 days as well as the iPad edition. It seemed to me to be very expensive considering there was no printing or distribution costs! Crikey was $160 for 13 months. I see more value in Crikey.
I can’t imagine I’ll need to see NYT sites more than 20 times per month, so no biggie.
Looking at the FAQ here:
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscriptions-and-purchases.html
I was wondering what would happen if I linked to an NYT article via Huffington Post, and note:
‘We encourage links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines, blogs and social media. When you visit NYTimes.com through a link from one of these channels, that article (or video, slide show, etc.) will count toward your monthly limit of 20 free articles, but you will still be able to view it even if you’ve already read your 20 free articles.
When you visit NYTimes.com by clicking links in search results, you’ll have a daily limit of 5 free articles. This limit applies to the majority of search engines.’
Newspapers should take a leaf out of the Apple paybook. Microcharges, 50 cents per article, or some other mini charge across the board would have yielded a better outcome than what will inevitably be a failure for the NYT. There is adequate material elsewhere freely obtained, which undercuts the NYT.
As for paying for Crikey? That’s an entirely different matter.
Oh happy day! The paywall should result in fewer innocents being entranced by the lies of elite appeasers.
Enough people wont pay for it. They will go to free papers and if they get PayWalled, they will get news on TV
There is no mention of having a daily charge. 50 cents to access the “daily” edition of the newspaper so it’s a smaller enticement to slowly pull people in.
Yeah, the limited free access is quite a clever compromise, but it may not be clever enough. The problem is that the kind of content newspapers carry is constantly going down in value.
There are two components to this content. The first is the old style latest update, including the “scoop”, the exclusive, the most current update available. As BK showed yesterday, that’s a race against realtime media like Twitter that newspapers can never win. Twitterers don’t need salaries, workers’ comp insurance, or even subediting. They just do it for the joy of twittering. Speed is not a premium commodity any more.
The second is what Lachlan Harris called the “opinion cycle” in last night’s Q&A. The opinion cycle has largely taken over from the news cycle, because it’s the easiest content to find and publish. As the Americans like to say, opinions are like a**holes, everybody’s got one.
Once again, same problem: why charge money for reading someone’s opinion when there are people out there who would probably pay you to publish theirs? Opinions are not a premium commodity either, especially when the writer’s only real claim to fame is the fact that you’ve already heard his or her opinion before.
There’s a third type of content, which is authority, prestige, reliability, somewhere people can go for a trustworthy account when their heads are spinning with misinformation. Australia’s Financial Review used to be a bit like that, but it’s mostly financial fluff these days. If anything, its paywall may have made AFR less open to challenges and comparisons with the riff-raff.
As the internet becomes progressively more congested with free realtime news content and free opinion content, the authority of a truly dependable masthead is the only thing that will become harder and harder to find, and therefore more and more valuable. Any websites gaining that kind of reputation will be able to attract premium advertising, because that prestige and trustworthiness will rub off on the advertiser. Charging readers for access to those ads will do them no good at all.
Truth therefore need not be the first casualty of the internet; it could turn into the last redoubt when all else descends into chaos.
For that type of premium publication, you wouldn’t even need journalists. No need for opinion columnists, “analysts”, photographers, or editorial writers. Reporters were mediators of the printed word back in the print era. These days there’s a host of travellers, academics, and professionals who can write better (in their particular field of knowledge) than journalists can, and they don’t even need to be paid.
What it would need is fact-checkers, an army of them, with a range of bachelor degrees in science, law, economics, whatever they’re fact-checking. You’d need subscriptions to various wire services and journals. Editors could simply trawl for the most reliable articles, cross-check everything, pay syndicate fees if applicable, and present a tight, coherent, trustworthy selection of articles for the reader. They could also take direct op-ed submissions, but contributors would not be paid. Being published in such a website would be its own reward.
And finally, you would need enough capital to run it for five years or so without much advertising revenue. Or however long it takes for the word to get around that it’s the most authoritative thing out there, when readers don’t know whom to believe, and they want the goods without all the claptrap.