I don’t know whether you have to spend a large portion of $50 million on it but market research seems like the most important part of such a project to me.
Are there pay walls that work well? What design patterns do these share? Is it possible to work together or meet those who built successful pay walls? What about SEO and advertising? (The next questions are best answered with an already existing firm knowledge of the possible alternatives:) What are current and potential New York Times readers willing to pay for online content? How do they want to pay? What online services are they currently paying for and how much?
Something that will (likely inevitably) also cost much is tying it all together. Meetings among high-level management are expensive but changing the business model is critical. My suggestion would be to have a small low-level independent team – preferably people who are working on the research or will be working on the implementation – come up with (very few) alternatives and to pitch those to management, limiting management’s involvement in the details. If possible the developers should probably also implement several alternatives and A/B test those.
It’s pretty clear to me that actual coding is only a small part of it. (Saying that it is a “tiny” part was a bit of an exaggeration.)
