
New York Times Prepares Plan to Charge for Online Reading - atularora
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704213404576100033883758352.html?mod=e2tw
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bryanlarsen
In the good old days of newspapers, newspapers made 80% of their income from
advertising and 20% from subscriptions and individual sales. 80% of their
expenses were devoted to printing, distribution and management, with 20% going
to pay content creators.

The biggest reason that newspapers charge for their content is just to ensure
that their newspapers go to people who actually want to read it and can afford
to do so. (Advertisers aren't interested in advertising to those who think a
dollar is a lot of money). That's not a problem on the web -- the marginal
cost is so low that there's no reason at all to limit your readership.

Yes, ad rates have gone down, but I find it very hard to believe that there's
not a viable business paying journalists and giving their content away, ad-
supported.

Another piece of evidence is the fact that those "subway papers" give away
physical newspapers for free. Yes, they don't pay much for content, but their
marginal costs per reader are so much higher.

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jcr
I'm looking forward to the HN submission filter preventing nytimes.com links.

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wybo
I wonder if this is going to work. First of all because it is a paywall, and
many people might go elsewhere.

But secondly, as set out in the article, their aim seems to be a semi-
transparent paywall, that will allow people to read a few articles before
triggering a payment requirement.

Will people buy into this?

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brudgers
When the NYT required logging-in using free registration, I rarely read their
articles online and would not click on articles linked to them. The same was
true a couple of years ago when the Washington Post briefly installed
annoyware.

Of course I may not be typical, but then again neither are people who
subscribe to the NYT to have it on their Kindle. If the NYT stops working
seemlessly with aggregators, it may be hard to replace the advertising revenue
they lose with subscriptions.

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jrockway
This is good to hear. I think content is worth paying for, and that producers
should charge for their work. Yes, it makes linking and therefore promotion
harder, but a lot of readers of NYT just visit the site and read a bunch of
articles.

Anyway, the advertising teat is going to dry up someday, and I'd like my
favorite publications to stay around. If it means paying for them with actual
money, it means paying for them with actual money. There is no other
alternative.

People have paid for ad-free books, movies, TV, and music for ages. Why not
newspapers?

(Incidentally, the article doesn't say whether or not the paid pages will have
advertising. If they do, they can rot in hell. If it's ad-free, though, then
they are on to something.)

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BenoitEssiambre
The pricing is ridiculous. In the digital age, people gets news from dozens of
sources not just one or two papers like it used to be. I myself am a bit of an
RSS junky and each day probably read more than 300 headlines, skim through
maybe 10 to 15 articles and read maybe two or three fully. Say I limited my
reading to only 10 websites, at the advertised price I would be paying $2400
per year!

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corin_
It's expensive, but at the same time, there'll still be plenty of people
willing to pay.

I currently pay for WSJ, FT, and a bunch of magazines, and NYT will join that
list when the paywall arrives. (And there are at least a couple more papers
I'd pay for if they required it, to allow me to read on the iPad.)

