
NYTimes to start charging for access to their website. - js3309
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html
======
imok20
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.

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.

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.

~~~
wvenable
I don't disagree with your statements but that doesn't mean I'll be paying and
here is why: I read articles from probably 15 different sites every day (and
not same 15 from day to day). I simply can't afford to pay a subscription to
every one of those sites nor do I want pay for just one site and get my news
from a single source.

The problem is that this the same dead-tree business model moved to the web.
It might appeal to people who consume their information in the classical
morning newspaper way but I suspect that is a dwindling market.

~~~
CamperBob
It seemed obvious to me in 1994 that Web content syndication was eventually
going to be the answer to your question ("How can I afford to subscribe to 15
different providers?")

People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around
2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact
that it needs to happen, and eventually will.

It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last
piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times
will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal.
If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest
broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.

------
pierrefar
>>"There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to
get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.

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.

So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?

Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?

~~~
smokinn
Are you somehow implying that a pay-wall can't be built? Porn sites seem to
have figured it out quite a while ago so I don't see how NYTimes would be any
different.

Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to
a friend but that generally isn't a problem.

Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart
techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue
since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid
for it anyway.

~~~
pierrefar
I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're
right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want
to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism
they think of can probably be circumvented easily.

~~~
ramchip
Most people would rather be honest and pay a few dollars than mess with
cookies/proxies/multiple accounts, especially if they don't know what a cookie
is in the first place.

If someone values his time sufficiently low to make several email accounts to
read the NYT without paying... he probably can't/won't pay, whatever is done.

~~~
pierrefar
That's a very fair point. My only counter to it is that us geeks will spread
the word that using Chrome in incognito mode is quite effective.

Ctrl-Shift-N is quite fast, and Google is pushing Chrome very hard, and us
geeks are called on for tech support quite often.

I think your honesty thought will win out most of the time, but not always.
People like a free lunch and sticking it to the man, especially if they have
the tools to do it very easily. We'll see.

------
gr366
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.

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.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html?pagewanted=print)

------
e40
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.

------
billybob
In other news, "billybob to stop reading nytimes.com"

~~~
symesc
No kidding. I dropped WSJ.com last year and don't miss it.

The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers
have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.

Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right
mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider
before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000
versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."

I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of
someone trying to save his job.

~~~
robg
Aren't most of those other sites derivative though? They opine on the news
reported by others (or just copy/paste), and often poorly without relevant
context. Moreover, I kinda like one-stop shopping for World, National,
Business, and Technology news. It's not perfect, given journalistic biases,
but it's often good enough.

I may be biased though. I grew up delivering and reading the newspaper.

~~~
Quarrelsome
I grew up delivering and reading newspapers and this has only shown me that
the vast majority of "news" is just re-hashed press releases, or opinionated
FUD.

The vast majority of my round bought the Daily Mail (who supported the facists
in the UK, "hoorah the black shirts") or The Sun (famous for their "HIV is
only catchable by homosexuals" opinion).

The world would be a better place without most of the newspapers out there.
Quality reporting is another matter all together and is NOT synonymous with
the term "newspapers".

~~~
robg
I grew up delivering a state paper. They did quality reporting about the small
state. They still do. But I don't see how they survive without going
hyperlocal. The problem is my parents (i.e., the generation that still
subscribes) want a general news product in addition to the local stuff.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Largely the same discussion happened on this item:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507>

Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought
I'd make the connection since I noticed it.

Also reported here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009>

A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.

------
jsm386
"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."

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.

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...

Will they deindex from Google? Wi

------
Nekojoe
"Starting in early 2011..." that's an age away in internet time. Things could
have changed considerably by then.

~~~
ramchip
It's just one year...the Internet in early 2009 wasn't all that much different
from now. I frequent the same websites I did back then, personally.

~~~
hexis
As an example of a large change in 2009, Facebook went from 150 million active
users to 350 million active users (
<http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline> ). I consider that a fairly
large change in the consumer web.

~~~
ramchip
Actually... you're right! I completely forgot that I registered on Facebook
last summer :)

------
moron4hire
<sarcasm>I didn't realize anyone still read traditional news
outlets.</sarcasm>

Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.

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.

~~~
smiler
Can you point me to some good citizen journalism then?

~~~
Padraig
<http://talkingpointsmemo.com> <http://fivethirtyeight.com>

~~~
dagw
Any that aren't about US politics?

------
KWD
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
robg
You're basically willing to trade one cup of coffee for a month of decent
journalism, but no more?

~~~
markpercival
And at $1.50 it's not going to be a particularly good cup of coffee.

But I'm in the same boat. I already shell out ~$100 a year for the Economist,
and various other subscriptions. If I have to start paying for all the news
SOURCES I read I'm going to be out a great deal more. Note I said SOURCES. I'm
willing to pay for news, but not a monthly subscription to a news site I only
read occasionally.

~~~
buss
This almost sounds like you'd be willing to pay dues to the AP or Reuters. I
don't think that's such a bad idea. I know it would never fly in America but a
funding system similar to the BBC, where households have to purchase licenses
for things, might work well.

------
DanielStraight
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.

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.

------
discolemonade
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.

------
siculars
How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la
GoogleShare (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495>)? If they allow a
certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies
periodically.

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.

------
ibsulon
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.

Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print
is not targeted at us.

------
mattparcher
I agree with John Gruber, who cited this tweet from Dave Winer (developer,
entrepreneur, writer, and a pioneer of RSS and podcasting):

"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."

<http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921>

------
notirk
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.)

~~~
vermontdevil
See cable as an example.

Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO
etc).

So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to
subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending
on the audience.

------
ilamont
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.

No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch
app.

~~~
wallflower
> No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super)
> iPhone/iTouch app.

I assume it will sadly turn into the WSJ app (few free articles, majority
subscriber-only).

Of course, I can see Steve Jobs and Apple working a deal with the NYTimes to
bundle a free 1-yr subscription for their iSlate owners.

------
RyanMcGreal
This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model
doesn't work.

I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.

------
rarrrrrr
Great -- I'd like to support their journalism efforts and I'm not interested
in home delivery.

------
redwax
Keeping the poor uninformed is important for modern democracy.

~~~
redwax
Can anyone explain the downvotes ? Surely my point is valid even if couched in
the sarcasm of devils advocacy - are sarcasm tags needed ?

A democracy cannot function without an informed public. The press has
traditionally been seen as the main guarantor of keeping people informed.
Creating a paywall is exclusiory to the less well off. This therefore makes
the United States less democratic.

Can I please be argued with rather than downvoted or is there no such thing as
netiquette these days ?

