I work for the Times as a developer so I'm going to stay out of this conversation other than trying to correct or inform. I'm keeping my own opinions to myself (as best as I humanly can).
So with that said, here are 3 links I received that shed more light on this:
"A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions"
Are you still going to support http://mobile.nytimes.com ? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription, but I don't like the smartphone apps and strongly prefer reading the mobile site on my phone's browser instead.
I have managed to read NYtimes for the last several years, without having an account, and primarily using bugmenot to pass around the user registration, which annoyed me to no end.
With that said, I would consider creating an account and paying, a big selling point for me, (which is not mentioned in any of the articles presented would be, that as a paying customer, it would be great if no ads are visible, just premium content.
Oh come on, what are you basing this on? The content as compared to the vast majority of other newspapers online and print is far superior in every way imaginable. If you want to see bad please check out chron.com.
Well, the whole shilling-for-the-Pentagon-in-the-run-up-to-the-Gulf-War stink is still floating around. Also, the editorial policy of allowing the word "torture" to describe waterboarding except in instances when the US is doing the tortur...ahem, waterboarding is more than odious.
Pointing out the inferiority of less consequential papers doesn't absolve them. The point is that these guys consider themselves THE paper of record. You can't pride your self on a higher standard, then get defensive and angry when people actually hold you to it.
If you really want, there are fingerprinting techniques to uniquely identify a user without using any cookies. (e.g. combination of user agent, installed fonts, screen resolution, screen depth, city, country, ip, etc...)
Long time coming. Great product and great service. They're fighting for the survival of the paradigm.
What is that paradigm? I think some news outlets, mostly business, have proven people are willing to pay for valuable news, the WSJ comes to mind.
The NY Times has a mix of hard news and soft opinions, their main problem is that almost the same news is available from many free sources around the Internet.
So I am genuinely perplexed as to what the paradigm is?
The paradigm is one news outlet having reporters all over the country and the world covering things that may or may not make ripples in financial markets, but may be just as or more important. It's one outlet having the breadth to well cover a breaking event with disparate news aspects (the Japan earthquake being a good example) that touch all manners of people and businesses across the globe. Every decent-sized metro daily used to have bureaus in Beirut, Israel, Egypt, etc. There are plenty of reasons, some of them good, that this is no longer the case. The New York Times is one of the last vestiges of that age and I don't think that nostalgia is the only reason we should root for its success.
The only thing that guarantees that success, as Rupert Murdoch has pointed out, is sustainable profitability. I think the Times' move to charge people for their coverage will ultimately be successful, just as the efforts of the FT and WSJ have been and, to a degree, as NPR's has been.
Dude, get out of there. I worked at another place that stole a lot of your developers and they all hated that place. Old media is a dying breed. Get out while you can.
Workarounds aside, I won't pay. It's totally a fair price, and so is the $5-20/month the 100 other services I use are asking me to pay. But in the aggregate I can't afford it. The web has allowed us to become readers of many perspectives, and this movement (regardless of whether it's right or wrong) will push us back to identity subscribers.
> "The web has allowed us to become readers of many perspectives, and this movement (regardless of whether it's right or wrong) will push us back to identity subscribers."
Most people have not used the web to become readers of many perspectives; rather, they've used it to find media outlets that conform to their preconceived biases. The web has allowed niche voices, who previously couldn't find a large enough audience to be economically viable when media distribution was geographically limited, to thrive. While paywalls might exacerbate this a bit most people are already de facto "identity subscribers."
I'll probably pay. The NY Times is my main news source, and I think it's worth $15 a month. I want newspapers to survive. If that means they need to have online subscribers, then so be it. Good things cost money. I'm worried that the alternative will be news sources that optimize for pageviews alone.
Where I live, getting the NY Times paper delivered to me every day would cost me $5.85 a week (https://www.nytimesathome.com/checkout.php?step=1). So this is actually cheaper than a physical subscription.
Further than that, I assume that if they allow me to view their content for free with ads, that their business model works. What they are telling me now is that their business model does not work.
Also, and this is not a small point, I recently graduated from grad school and got a real job.
It is more expensive than Netflix or an Amazon prime account. They're different things, of course, but it seems too expensive to me. I'd probably subscribe at about half the price, but at $180/year, I'll just clear my cookies and/or read the Washington Post.
I work in the news media (public broadcasting), and right now the public still sees reporting as an inexpensive commodity, especially online. Ironically, I think public broadcasting is set up much better to garner supporting revenue from the public than for-profit media, since we have a history of doing so, and people inherently understand and relate to our support model. We still give away our content for free, too, even if you don't pay. The NYTimes is never going to be able to guilt me into paying the way NPR or PBS will.
And it's $180/year for an experience that is going to be diluted by their continuing need to please advertisers. It would be a stronger strategy if they said that serving the needs of their $180/year customers is going to be the sole driver of the design and direction of their site.
You cannot compare it to Amazon/Netflix. They are not creating any of the content. NY Times is. The price includes the cost of content creation and delivery.
Cost of delivery has gone to near 0 when amortized, but this is more expensive than some of their dead tree subscriptions.
I know paper isn't as expensive as some might think, but most people see that as real value. By stripping that away and keeping the price the same, I think many people are going to feel ripped off by comparison.
Heh I'm aware that devs aren't free, being one myself, but a few devs can create a content distribution system that rivals the reach of a many, many million dollar printing and delivery infrastructure. Reasonably priced servers can serve up a shocking amount of content when caching is used properly. So, much closer to 0, and the marginal cost of a reader is effectively 0.
Okay - as a dev you should know that hosting is not cheap. Does it cost Twitter nothing to 'delivery' its content?
As someone who can peak behind the curtain, I assure you that its not free. Maybe cheaper than physical home-delivery of thew newspaper, but its not cheap.
It should be surprisingly cheap in relative terms, not necessarily in absolute terms. I would imagine that the NYT is much more cacheable than Twitter, given the nature of the site.
This does not include the paper mills and the delivery trucks.
The point trying to be raised is that the infrastructure needed for print distribution is much, much heavier than that for electronic distribution. And much harder to scale.
Because of this, it seems like the online subscriptions are overpriced relative to print.
I agree they're have different relationships to content creation. But I don't think most people see much of a distinction between news and entertainment (which is problematic in it's own right). Nor do many people care who is an actual creator vs. who is merely a distributor. At the end of the day, we write the check to Netflix, not to MGM studios.
What people do care about is the value that the content provides them, and is that content worth the price. I think the NYTimes does a great job, but I don't know they provide so much more value than their competitor who gives their stuff away for free.
And Netflix is buying the film and video content from the distributors and publishers, so the customer is still paying for content creation and delivery.
What content does the NY Times create? They cover the news, with some help form the AP and Bloomberg, does that count? Would anyone pay $195 for a year's worth of editorials?
I hope Google News adds support for hiding sites that put their articles behind paywalls (perhaps manually on a per-user basis, like they've added support for in search results). I see lots of WSJ articles on Google News, and oftentimes I click on them before looking at the source, only to end up facing a paywall.
This problem's only going to keep getting worse as more sites start erecting paywalls, and there are plenty of people like me who have no interest in paying for an online news subscription and would appreciate the ability to completely hide those sites.
All you need to do to read those articles is to paste the title of the article into Google and click on the first result from wsj. it will take you straight to the full article.
I didn't realize that would yield a different result from clicking on the article from a Google News page (isn't the HTTP referrer Google either way?). In any case, that seems like too much trouble (unless there is an extension to automate it), so an option to hide certain domains from Google News would be very helpful.
Not to mention there are certain news sites (Fox News, for example) which I have no desire to visit regardless of whether they are employing a paywall.
Given that I read the Times on my iPhone, iPad, and computer, I can subscribe for $35 a month, or apparently I can subscribe to 7 day delivery, which includes all of the above, for $22 a month and throw the paper away when it arrives each day.
Clearly their pricing policy is off by an order of magnitude. Paying $35 a year for everything makes sense. Paying $35 a month, given economics and the market for online subscriptions, is nuts.
You can get free digital access if you have any form of home delivery. I can get weekday delivery for $14.80 for 4 weeks, or Sunday delivery for $15 for 4 weeks. That gets you the full $35 digital product. I'll probably get the Sunday times delivered.
I've seen a few other publishers do this too, and it seems hopelessly perverse. If the digital edition has zero advertisements, then I can understand that it reflects the true cost of production (qua newsgathering, writing and editing).
But it's still going to create a perception among the public that the online readers are subsidizing the print readers to a certain extent, and indirectly the printing and paper companies as well. And for those who care about such things, the ongoing consumption of about 100,000 (farmed) trees annually. If online readers get a better deal by subscribing to the paper version and putting it straight into the recycling bin every day, then the NYT is encouraging them to consume in the most wasteful way possible. This also reduces the value to advertisers, who are going to start discounting the subscription figures proportionally to 1/(web_traffic_growth/online_subs_growth).
This isn't helped the options of NYT + smartphone edition, NYT + tablet edition, and NYT + everything edition (crossword puzzles and other NYT products excluded). Where is the NYT + no frills edition? I do read news on my phone, but I prefer a bare minimum summary of important events in that context. But apparently I must purchase a mobile app I don't want and would never use in order to have subscriber access via the browser.
That's fitting. I need to log-in to read about their change to a pay-only model!
[update]
Though:
wget -qO- 'url' | less
gets me to the content just fine...
[summary]
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.
Once readers click on their 21st article, they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 for a month of access to the Web site and a mobile phone app; $20 for Web access and an iPad app; and $35 for an all-access plan.
The NYtimes is a great publication but it can't simply be "now we are going to charge for this". There has to be some tradeoff. For example, lately they have been running a huge expandable ad at the top of their homepage and, quite frankly that looks unprofessional and is annoying. So if as a subscriber they can get rid of some of that and several other undesirable ad locations ( I realize advertising will still be a part of their business model) then it may be an ok proposition.
The tradeoff though is that their articles will be reaching a smaller group of readers, even with the 20 free a month.
"The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada, which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system goes live in the United States."
We usually have delayed launch dates in Canada (like iPhones and iPads). Really caught the fuzzy end of that lollipop.
Yeah, my reaction was "gee, thanks". It's started counting for us and I've just burned two reading about the damned paywall.
I paid for TimeSelect before, but I'm not sure I'd pay again: I just don't read enough from the Times to justify the cost. If I find that I need more, then I'll happily pay it (and it looks like it'll be pay-as-you-go).
Do you have an alternative idea? It seems to me that the only way to maintain quality and at least a little bit of objectivity is to charge a flat fee. Charging for use (including advertising) drives individual writers and sections to via for the most eyeballs and clicks. Charging a flat fee requires the entire newspaper to improve.
Also, it won't be long before all the news fit to read is behind some sort of paywall (or something similar), unless drastic change takes place.
Don't be so sure. The Times is one of the few outfits where this approach may actually work. Look at the WSJ, another such outlet -- 1 million people pay $100/year for online access (no paper). That's $100M/year, which makes a big difference at a newspaper. That's a lot of extra reporters.
That's roughly 50% of what the nyt wants to charge, and for, arguably, more valuable information. While I understand and mostly accept the idea of a paywall, the price is too high.
They want to support a cost structure that's archaic, and centered around their print product. They need to charge 50-60% less, and cut costs accordingly. That's probably what will happen in the long run.
They aren't trying, they are flailing around in desperation. When you start toggling all the levers to see if one of them works you've given up trying to understand and respond to the problem rationally and you're just hoping beyond hope that some darwinian mutation based process will save your bacon. Most of the time it doesn't work.
There is no easy band-aid fix for the disruption of the traditional news media. A successful "newspaper" equivalent in 2020 will bear little resemblance to what we consider a newspaper to be today. That alone should be obvious. But instead of changing with the march of history the NYT has decided to change as little as possible and hope that things work out for the best. They may stave off immediate doom but their plan is too shallow to stave off long-term doom.
I can't see how you could come to this conclusion, but I'll play along...
What do you envision the "newspaper" of 2020 will look like? HuffPo? Please. That rag is 75% unadulterated opinion pieces and biased claptrap.
To me, you sound like someone who is complaining that you're now going to be expecte do pay for a high-quality product that up until now you've been receiving for free.
I /pay/ for the WSJ, The Economist, and Forbes on Kindle. Before that option was available to me, I paid for those subscriptions to be mailed/delivered to my home. I'm /exactly/ the kind of customer that they want, because I have money to spend and I will hand it over if I find value. I think their advertisers appreciate the difference. Compare the quality of reporting between your average local "free" newspaper and the NYTimes (or almost any other major newspaper).
Personally, I applaud the folks at NYTimes. They've been dealt a tough hand and they are doing their best to stay relevant.
I too am willing to pay for relevance, but not for news as they are filled with the same stories, spin, stupid opinions and not nearly enough stories that actually matter (when was the last time the nytimes destroyed a politicians who had done something illegal?) are wetted by experts (witness the current comments about the neuclear stuff in Japan where very little is actually know but everybody is writing about it) and completely free of spin.
The problem with this analysis is that those issues are everything. You're basically asking the NYT to redefine itself from the ground up. That's fine. Except why wouldn't it be easier to just start out elsewhere from scratch. "I like that restaurant, it's pretty good. All they need to change are their prices, their decor, their selections, their staff, and their chef... then they'd be great!"
Let's back up a second. Why are newspapers being disrupted by the internet so severely? Well, for a while newspapers (and later local tv affiliates) were the only mass communication channels available. That put them in a unique position to serve as gatekeeper of news and information for a community, which allowed them to make money off of being a broadcast medium as well as their own original content. So newspapers were able to make money off of classified ads, rebroadcasted wire reports, comics, etc. This situation allowed newspapers to bloat up into huge organizations and make a lot of money off of little effort. The original investigative journalism within a newspaper made up a shockingly small percentage of their total efforts. The internet has made the broadcast functions of newspapers utterly obsolete, making the only economically useful function of newspapers their original reporting, which they do very poorly and also very rarely. Newspapers have a self-identification as this whole broadcast / gatekeeper enterprise, they have been having a hard time imagining they could be anything else (such as an organization that doesn't print classified ads, wire reports, or marmaduke comics).
If I knew what the newspaper of 2020 was going to look like I'd be building a business around that (and I may do so regardless). I know for damned sure that the newspaper of 2020 won't be dominated by material that is unnecessarily rebroadcast, and unfortunately that includes a lot of what's in the NYT today.
As for HuffPo, that's not a source of news, nor is it the future of journalism (it may not even outlast the NYT). As to "paying for a high-quality product" I dispute the notion that the NYT is anything of the sort. It's as much a rag as HuffPo, it's just a lot better at maintaining "production value".
Personally I think the future of journalism will be in smaller, more focused groups who are subject matter experts first and journalists not by training per se but by practice.
"It's as much a rag as HuffPo, it's just a lot better at maintaining "production value"."
Well then, you're in luck. The content you don't care about will not longer be free to you. Enjoy your full refund.
Seriously, I can't take you seriously if you don't suggest an alternative. Print and other broadcast media were the most efficient way to reach large numbers of people. The internet changes that somewhat because you no longer have (much of) a marginal cost to differentiate your information product. The long tail works for information products as well.
UNFORTUNATELY, this means that those things (classifieds, ads, coupons/inserts) aren't going to be available to subsidize the higher-cost things (investigative eporting, foreign bureaus). Craigslist and eBay did more to hurt newspapers than "bloggers" ever did. Free NYtimes content online was a way to stay in the game until they could figure out the new business model. Which they will or they wont.
What I don't get is your anger over this. Why do you care? Either they'll do OK or they wont. The only difference to YOU that I can see is that you'll no longer have access to that "rag" for free. You've already stated that you dont like the articles. It's clear to me that you're not going to be taxed on them either.
The rest of us who are willing to pay (because we find value) will probably do so. I'm thankful that someone else is willing to do the hard work and write this stuff up. I've got precious little time as it is and the premium I am willing to pay for smart, relevant content is some value substantially greater than zero.
The ideal is that these kernels of value (investigative journalism, for example) flourished under the subsidization of advertising. They reality is the opposite, they withered away while news media grew fat and lazy. It's easier to concentrate on reprints of family circle, regurgitated wire reports, opinion pieces, and facile human interest stories than it is to do the hard gum-shoe work of real reporting.
The internet has pulled the rug out from under newspapers by taking away the value of all that fluff, because broadcasting is now effectively free and ubiquitous. That means that the only substantive value newspapers have anymore (outside of tradition, which will only maintain for so long) is in their original reporting and the quality of their opinion. Even in the off chance that there are news institutions with substantial value in these areas it's unlikely that the public is willing to pay enough for that to also support paying money for editing wire reports and redistributing beetle bailey. But newspapers are generally fundamentally incapable of redefining themselves as anything other than the bloated institutions they've been, they would rather go down with "dignity" than to change who they are.
Why do I care? Because I care about the news and I hate to see it continue to be dragged down by these failing corporate behemoths.
I think the future of journalism is, as I said, in much leaner institutions who put the focus on the subject and the quality of reporting first, are not burdened by the bloat of outmoded institutional conceptions of what being a "newspaper" means, and who have financial incentives which align with the incentives to produce better reporting.
They're pulling 3 or 4 levers on this one alone. This package reminds me of Microsoft's strategy of Windows Home, Windows Basic, Windows Premium, Windows Ultimate, etc. etc.
I unloaded on the New York Times in a comment about 2 days ago, but I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by this approach.
It allows them continue to make ad revenue as well as get subscription money from people who really like their service (unless I'm not understanding it clearly).
The only thing I'd suggest is prominently displaying a counter for the user saying 'you have x pages left before you must subscribe to access this site' or something like that .. that way they're not taken by surprise when they can't access a story any more.
First I thought terrific. I would definitely pay a monthly fee to read the NYT without ads. But then I learned I have to pay and there is still advertising.
I definitely will miss reading the paper but I am betting in less than six months the wall will disappear. Any takers?
I feel that if they are going to charge, charge for the big investigative and in depth pieces that you can't just get elsewhere. Some of the shorter stuff, which is rehashed over many different news sites is a lot harder sell for payment.
I feel like I read more than 20 articles a month just from various links, but not enough to make it worth $15/mo. If they had some option to increase the number of views for the rest of the month for $5 or less, I'd at least consider it.
Depends on who's links are sending you to the site. From the e-mail I got:
Readers who come to Times articles through links from
search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter
will be able to read those articles, even if they have
reached their monthly reading limit. For some search
engines, users will have a daily limit of free links
to Times articles.
So someone spoofing a referrer link with curl would have free access?
Or are you also checking those referrer links somehow, to make sure they're legitimate?
I also take it from your other reply about curl (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2336371) that you're using ip address, as opposed or maybe in addition to cookies to enforce the 20 articles per month limit.
First, this isn't a project I worked on directly so bear that in mind in that I cant address specific points (but will update if I learn the answers).
I will say this much; its expected that many people will find away to get around the paywall via plugins, curl, whatever. There are no illusions about that.
However this is not typical of your average user - that much I've seen. While I'm sure this will happen, and it might be easy for many, it will not be something I'd expect of most users and no something that will impact subscriptions IMHO.
I don't think that'll work for me, as I use 3rd-party Twitter clients that won't be able to pass a Twitter.com referrer.
(And unless Twitter whitelists all URL shorteners, the referrer likely wouldn't point back to Twitter anyway. But many of my friends use custom URL shorteners, and the Times wouldn't know to whitelist those… and the list of problems goes on.)
I think 20 articles a month is actually quite fair, this covers most of the uses cases of reading an article because X linked to it. It is a happy middle ground.
I wish them the best of luck, although I don't think it will work out.
After visiting the Newseum last summer in D.C., I fully support things like this. We need entities still doing journalism and not just creating content.
They only have one competitive risk: government regulation. The only way that happens is if their PR as cuddly bunny hugging geeks in bathrobes made of organic llama hair get destroyed. People hoping for good PR cannot afford to be an existential threat to the NYT.
Now if you or I did it, on the other hand... well, maybe their First Click Free policy covers us, but I wouldn't bet my business on it.
But people could just create a new free account once they reach the 20-article limit. Perhaps they are hoping that readers will not be clever/motivated enough to clear cookies and re-register...
Why go through the effort? When I end up on an NY Times page, I just close it because I know they're going to make me log in. This just gives me more incentive to not click on NY Times links.
i'm glad someone else posted this. i do the same thing. i don't know why, but it annoys to no end to be forced to log in when i've clicked through to an article from somewhere. i'm sure that i am in the minority, and so my opinion does not count, but it really has made me realize just how little i care about reading some of the articles that a simple login dissuades me from actually reading them. i have a feeling that once the paywall limit is hit, far fewer people will then the nyt imagines will be tempted to pay. they may just close the tab and move on with their lives. that's fine, of course, the nytimes doesn't have to cater to people who don't value their product, but it does pave the way towards a more specialized, targeted product. people happily subscribe to news sites about minor league baseball or the franchise restaurant business. we'll see what happens here.
I expect they will. However its fair to say that the large number of people that use them will be eclipsed by the number who don't.
It is accepted and known that if people are determined to get around the paywall they'll find a way. For that reason its deliberately porous - a convenience factor or sorts.
What he meant is that the bookmarklet will actually scrape the content from within your browser and submit it to Instapaper if you have access and Instapaper's crawler doesn't. Marco has discussed that functionality on the Build and Analyze podcast.
Interestingly I'd pay for the aggregated view thats provided on http://givemesomethingtoread.com/ but somehow don't have enough interest to pay for just NYT. Maybe that's Marco's eventual business model?
How does your comment not also apply to checking out library materials?
I will go a step further, reading paywalled content for free at the public or university library is exactly the same, especially for content providers, as checking out materials for free.
If you don't love libraries with all your heart I don't think there is much more for me to say.
Its not abuse when the Times offers the service for free to all library patrons, nor when the library (commonly) has paid license to the historical content as well.
Edit: Also, off-campus access to electronic resources using a proxy is standard in the licenses for these sort of products.
I wonder if Times Select users who paid their annual renewal fee about a month before nytimes.com reverted to free again will receive any credit toward this new pay scheme. Hypothetically speaking, of course.
As someone who doesn't use the NYT as a primary source of news, but frequently ends up there through links, I'm curious to see if/how soon I'll reach the 20 article limit.
Not all visits to NYTimes.com will count toward the 20-article limit. In an effort to ensure that as many as possible of the Web site’s more than 30 million monthly readers are not deterred from visiting, The Times will allow access to people who visit through search engines like Google and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. There will, however, be a five-article limit a day for people who visit the site from Google.
I like the content, but $196 a year is more than I'm willing to pay -- it's twice the yearly cost of an "all you can eat" streaming Netflix subscription.
This would be the price of emerging 'do not track' policies and a hostile climate towards advertising targeting. The money's got to come from somewhere.
I don't think it's fair to pin this on disruptions in attitudes towards advertising. The much bigger factor is that they're an industry that once had and was structured around having a near-monopoly on mass information distribution (diluted by radio and TV). Now they suddenly find that they don't even have a majority hold on that anymore, and have lost almost all of their leverage with people that want to advertise things, and it's a problem that's been getting worse.
If I were to pay I would expect to receive only content, not ads, but I really doubt that would be the case, so other sources await.
Edit: Although there is a pretty big loophole..
From the article:
Not all visits to NYTimes.com will count toward the 20-article limit. In an effort to ensure that as many as possible of the Web site’s more than 30 million monthly readers are not deterred from visiting, The Times will allow access to people who visit through search engines like Google and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. There will, however, be a five-article limit a day for people who visit the site from Google.
So with that said, here are 3 links I received that shed more light on this:
"A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions"
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html
"Digital Subscriptions and Premium Products"
http://www.nytimes.com/content/help/account/purchases/subscr...
More Info
http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.htm...
I hope they prove useful and informative.