

Observations-New York Times Paywall: What everyone else seems to be missing - AustinEnigmatic
http://ownlocal.com/newspaper-support-group/new-york-times-paywall-observations

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rmason
You can reach your limit on one browser, then read another twenty on another
browser. Despite that I have probably cut my reading in half.

I found the NYT had some of the most relevant ads of any site that I visit. As
a result I am clicking on fewer ads and resulting in less revenue for them,
but I may be atypical.

The whole paywall has encouraged me to check out other sites for news. The BBC
I've found to be terrific and offers background articles on American issues
not seen in any US paper.

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adamjernst
If the argument you're making is "the free market is working because the
paywall is driving traffic to other news vendors," keep in mind that the BBC
is taxpayer-subsidized by Britain's citizens—and many of them aren't too happy
about it.

(I don't know if you're making this argument or not. Just an observation.)

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contrast
Many of Britain's citizens aren't too happy about free speech, either. But we
try not to pay too much attention to them.

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seldo
Another possible explanation is that the way Quantcast and others count unique
visitors is broken: they don't (/can't) take into account multiple computers
and multiple browsers.

If the NY Times paywall has user-level tracking (I'm not sure if it does, but
sometimes the NYTimes asks me to log in to read articles, so it may do) then a
bunch of people who are now hitting their quota browsing across multiple
machines and browsers with a single login were previously being counted as
multiple uniques.

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danso
The NYT has had user accounts since at least 1999...I've had the same login
name as I had about 10 years ago.

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eli
Notably, though, the account is not required.

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seldo
My point exactly. I know the accounts exist, I wasn't sure if they'd made
login mandatory after the paywall went up.

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andrewcooke
i've not noticed this paywall at all. do anti-tracking plugins (adblock,
ghostery, disconnect) zap the cookies or whatever that it uses? or is it
perhaps only for americans? (i realise it's not immediate, but i follow links
there fairly regularly and have never exceeded any quota).

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totalc
Adblock does _not_ allow you to dodge the paywall, from personal experience.

There is an easy way to escape the paywall: After a new page opens, wait for
the text to load, then after the text is loaded but the rest of the site's
infrastructure is still loading, hit Escape to stop loading. Whatever code is
responsible for summoning the paywall GUI never finishes loading.

This solution does not work well when trying to open multiple NYT tabs,
however.

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usaar333
I find that the easiest way to escape is to go incognito in chrome.

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kalmar
A possible contribution to the decrease that was not mentioned is that they
may be linked to less often because of the pay wall. For general news, a
blogger might instead link to some other, more reliably visitable site. When
the Montreal Gazette introduced their pay wall at least one blog I follow
avoided linking there when there was another source.

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cincinnatus
Indeed I would think most bloggers would look for alternate sources.

I also find I tend not to follow links if they are identified as NYT, and the
loss of the ability to push links to Instapaper has really killed NYT for me.

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sixtofour
It's a _pay_ wall. Which means someone is paying to get through the wall,
where less people were paying before the wall.

What I'd like to see is total revenue per. Per unique, per view, per
registered subscriber, per something.

It may (or may not) be that NYT has lost the battle but won the war for
revenue and profit.

