I've been hoping for this for over a year now. I'm _more_ than happy to support their journalists oversea and at home (USA for me, as for the NYT). Without some sort of support, we wouldn't be getting the same breadth and depth and quality of news.<p>It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.<p>This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.
>>"There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.<p>Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP-based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.<p>So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?<p>Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?
I don't suppose this means that subscribers will get a version without banner ads. In the same way that newspapers have historically sold their print version for less than it cost to publish and made their money off print ads and classifieds, I imagine we'll get much the same experience but be paying for it. NYT doesn't want to trade ad revenue for subscriber revenue. They want to augment it.<p>BUUUUUT, since the internet is a dynamic medium, maybe they could offer a tiered pricing scheme (like every other for-pay web app these days) that includes a no ads option. It should be easy enough: just display the print version of the article.<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html?pagewanted=print" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...</a>
The NYT used to have a pay model. I paid them something like $8/mo. I didn't really use what I got over the free side of the site, but I wanted to support their journalism. After a few months I got an email that they would no longer be billing me.
Largely the same discussion happened on this item:
<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507</a><p>Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought I'd make the connection since I noticed it.<p>Also reported here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009</a><p>A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.
"But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand."<p>Given the widely accepted disaster that was TimesSelect, this doesn't seem to be off to a promising start. How do you make such a monumental decision about your business, announce it publically, and say, yeah, we'll figure out how this will work soon, get back to us in a few months.<p>And it's not just business strategy. As pierrefar notes in another thread, they haven't figured out how they're going to achieve this anyway...<p>Will they deindex from Google? Wi
<sarcasm>I didn't realize anyone still read traditional news outlets.</sarcasm><p>Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.<p>This is the death-knell of the traditional news media. When they start actively driving consumers away by charging for services once rendered free, there is no way they will be able to recover. The Internet has enabled citizen journalists to get inside the established media's OODA loop and take them out. Established media is too slow and too antiquated to ever be able to catch up, let alone get ahead and stay ahead.
I honestly don't think the metered approach will work for them. Most people will hit that point, and instead of paying will search for, and find, they have other alternatives. In the end, NY Times will just lose most of those regulars as the alternative becomes the primary source.
The free service right now (having a 'mini newspaper' emailed to you every morning) is nice, but to be honest, I would value this at about $1/month, but I might pay up to $1.50/month to support journalism. I suspect that they will want to charge more than this.
To me, there are order of magnitude differences between good news sites and regular news sites. NYTimes is, in my mind, the best of the best, so I would have no problem with paying. Actually, I'm glad to see them respect their own content enough to charge for it. The advice to consultants is always to not undervalue their time, yet the advice to big companies always seems to be to undervalue their products.<p>Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.
The problem with charging for news is that news as it's presented is unspectacular. Most people, if they don't have to-- won't pay for unspectacular information because chances are they can get it somewhere else because it isn't hard to produce or duplicate. I can get the same information from the NY Times at the Washpost. I do like their opeds though. I read David Brooks a lot. But I still won't pay for David Brooks' insight because it doesn't make me money or save me time or do something to make my life easier. That's the only kind of information you can form a business model around.
How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la GoogleShare (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495</a>)? If they allow a certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies periodically.<p>To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.
The NYT's target demographic is the top 40% of income producers middle age and older. They don't know how to reach us, and they're not worried about it for another few years. If they lose us (in a general sense here), they're not too worried yet. At that point, they'll start hiring people like Kos and other top bloggers on both sides of the isle as their columnists and target us.<p>Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print is not targeted at us.
I agree with John Gruber, who cited this tweet from Dave Winer (developer, entrepreneur, writer, and a pioneer of RSS and podcasting):<p>"My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they'd just do it."<p><a href="http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921</a>
I'm interested to see if paid subscribers have ads alongside their articles. I would consider paying it to contribute to good journalism AND have fewer ads (I am aware of AdBlock, however, I am also aware of how the Internet economy current works.)
It's really quite surprising that it's taken this long to reach the decision, and it will take another year before people start paying anything.<p>No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.
This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model doesn't work.<p>I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.