I would certainly love to slag on excessively top-heavy project management and the New York Times, but I think you're being a little unfair here. Many of those "What do we build?" discussions are critical and non-obvious.
To just look at one little piece, this decision has massive SEO implications. I have some notion of what people qualified to comment on them cost. I'm not nearly the caliber of firm the NYT would stake their future livelihood on by engaging for this kind of work, but even absent that, the minimum possible scope for that SEO engagement blows $10k out of the water.
There are all sorts of corporate SEO issues that just "appear" out of nowhere if a person doesn't consider it in advance.
A few examples from our site upgrade to drupal 7...
- comments permalinks were generating new identical pages under different URLs
- paginated pages were getting indexed by category, by author, by month, and sitewide ... creating tons of duplicate content issues
- the rel=canonical set up wasn't set up correctly either
- some of the modules for things like related posts & page titles needed redone
And that is just 1 small blog, whereas when you view the NYT it is likely spread across multiple submdomains, multiple CMS tools, and they likely have different directly competing business objectives for different sections. They also have a variety of inbound and outbound syndication partnerships which likely add yet more layers of complexity & yet more competing business objectives.
Upgrading our site cost 10's of thousands, and that was while valuing my time at nothing. If my time was valued at market rate it likely could have been into 6 figures...and all this was doing was upgrading a few platforms to newer versions, changing the site design, and adding a new payment system. Add in the layers of complexity and bureaucracy you would see at a big slow moving corporation (and tons of money into conducting tests and research) and I am not surprised it was in the 10's of millions.
I know one of our clients had a million Dollar CMS that they ended up having to scrap because of major issues with it...am not surprised that integration of a semi-porous paywall at the NYT would be pretty expensive.
Indeed, however even with SEO consultants brought in, and even a Snake Oil Consultant or two, the $40 million pricetag is insane. Obviously $10k is no where near realistic when it comes to all the planning between however many stakeholders there are in the site, as well as figuring out ads management and what not.
Realistically, we would all still be shocked if they had paid $2 million total.
Considering how important this is to the future of the NYT 10 million would have been completely reasonable. Don't forget sometimes a 1% better solution can really be worth 100 million.
It's only reasonable if that $10M actually buys you something more valuable than what you get for $2M, even by 1% as you state. I think many of us are questioning whether that could possibly be the case.
I'm genuinely interested in hearing some ideas of what $8M of extra investment could buy in this case?
I'm not denying that regardless there will be a hefty price point on accomplishing something like this in a major organization such as NYT - but there are still limits on how much seems fiscally responsible. Even at $10 million being a possible reasonable number, it's still a fraction of the $40 million spent.
OK, answer me this: who in the organization has the technical know-how to decide how to solve all the SEO and usability issues; and the authority to do so?
If there's nobody even close, then they will have massive spec churn.
Actually the NYT has a pretty sweet tech lab with a crew of guys very knowledgeable about this kind of stuff. Some of the stuff I saw in there was years ahead what I've seen elsewhere.
Of course, actually getting buy in from the organization as a whole is the hard part. Technology is always the easy piece.
Again, I am not disagreeing - there are certainly tons of things that can factor a major price increase - whether it's outside consultants, tons of meetings to iron out office politics, getting input from all stakeholders, etc.
But at a $40 million price tag, someone somewhere is either dropping the ball, or someone is taking serious advantage with billing far more than reasonable for their services.
> I'm not nearly the caliber of firm the NYT would stake their future livelihood on by engaging for this kind of work
Aside from working on your own, are there any other real differences? I mean, I know that while being a decent C programmer, I wouldn't hesitate to point at people that are way better than I am, because they can produce more, better code, quicker. How's that work in the honest portion of the "SEO" world?
In SEO you can be good at programming, design, writing, marketing, statistics, "consensus building", arcane knowledge, connections etc. Best to hire a company that has all of that. If you can. Plus, orgs with that much money and prestige like to pay for someone with a top tier portfolio, probably one of the "thought leaders" in the industry.
I am willing to bet good money the problem NYT faces is the same problem that www.expertsexchange.com faces (opse forgot a dash), google won't index them if you get a paywal when you are a user vs a bot. So probably the reason for the CSS hack. It was probably research and stuff. Basically you'd have a paywall but nobody will be able to get to it because the news won't come up on google news, google search etc.
However why the price tag was not a maximum of $1,000,000 beats me. Possibly massive user and seo testing. Maybe a chunk was bribes?
To just look at one little piece, this decision has massive SEO implications. I have some notion of what people qualified to comment on them cost. I'm not nearly the caliber of firm the NYT would stake their future livelihood on by engaging for this kind of work, but even absent that, the minimum possible scope for that SEO engagement blows $10k out of the water.