
New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers - nir
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/01/new_york_times_set_to_mimic_ws.html
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jordanb
I really hope this works for them. I subscribe to LWN and don't mind paying
for things that I find valuable (even news). I also like the idea of the
reader being the real customer instead of the advertiser.

But I don't think it _will_ work.

The problem is that the 50¢ a copy we used to pay was never the real money
maker for newspapers. What made the business so fat was the near-monopoly
control they had over many components of local advertising. That control is
gone and it's never coming back.

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samg
But remember one of their largest costs is also disappearing. Newspapers
almost certainly lost money per copy by selling it for 50¢, and made up for it
by selling ads. The problem will be selling that same metaphor of "copies" or
subscriptions, when each additional subscription costs them next to nothing.

~~~
potatolicious
But the real cost was never the production of the physical newspaper - it was
always centered on content. Content really hasn't gotten any cheaper to
produce, though... the fact that they're saving a few pennies a copy (that
they used to sell _for money_ ) by distributing their content _for free_
online is really little comfort to them I'm sure.

~~~
joshu
The typical newspaper pays 15-20% of revenues towards content creation and the
rest to printing and distribution.

The NYT spends a great deal more. Perhaps higher than 40% IIRC.

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jakarta
Doubt charging for NYT will work. FT and WSJ can get away with it because
their financial reporting is actually worth paying for by biz people.

I think what is really interesting to observe from all of this is the fact
that leaving families in charge of companies can lead to innovation
stagnation.

WaPo got lucky in that Buffett came aboard decades ago and steered the company
towards good capital allocation. Those kinds of lessons served them well and
they managed to purchase businesses to support their journalism operations
(Kaplan).

But the Sulzberger family (NYT) pretty much stuck with journalism. The
Bancroft family (WSJ) lucked out in that their product is good enough to pay
for, but early on they had the option of moving into providing financial data
services (think Bloomberg) and decided against it. They would have been an
absolute beast of a company today if they went that route.

~~~
nir
Both NYT and WSJ has a product good enough to pay for, but WSJ subscribers are
a lot more likely to have their subscription paid by their employer.

Same goes with the Economist, who's doing great at a time where Newsweek and
Time face serious problems. IMHO we're entering the age of expense account
publications, which will mean quality journalism will have much more limited
worldview and target audience.

~~~
jakarta
Ask yourself why the employer is willing to pay for the WSJ though. That's the
thing. There are only two financial newspapers and most employers, especially
in business, will be willing to pay for that because they see an informational
benefit in it. Same goes for The Economist, which is known for stellar
reporting in their Business/Finance section.

To contrast, the NYT does not offer the same kinds of benefits. Their
reporting on global issues faces stiff competition not only from the WSJ, FT,
and The Economist, but also TV/Radio journalism and other newspapers.

~~~
nir
I agree that WSJ, Economist, FT etc are excellent. But they all see the world
through a certain angle (a business executive's, to generalize).

Personally I often agree with that angle, but I think it wouldn't be ideal to
have high quality journalism written only from that specific view point.

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apowell
NYT, while you're charging for things, please let me purchase an ad-free
version of your iPhone app.

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natch
Not expecting this to work for them, but if it does, maybe they'll use the
money to start doing good investigative reporting again. I'd love to see more
journalist-run sting operations like reporters used to do in the old days.

~~~
electromagnetic
Agreed, had the quality of their paper (or of the newspaper industry in
general) been similar to what it was even just a decade ago, I believe this
could have worked.

However, the newspaper industry has been losing quality at a rate equaled only
by their loss of readers and one influences the other. This feedback loop
they've developed is going to be their death, and unless they can stall this
loop, they'll be gone for good, which IMO is a shame.

Unless this pay-for effort spurs new life and quality into their articles, I
doubt they'll manage to get enough people to pay the prices required. They
need to poach would-be payers from other newspapers and hold them as their
own. The newspaper industry is entering an evolutionary state, only the hyper-
competitive are going to survive this.

~~~
fungi
Can't really speak for the rest of the world (any one know any studies?) but
the quality of online is the Australian market is absolutely appalling.

The Sydney Morning Herald is probably the best broad sheet in the country, but
online smh.com.au is absolute link baiting trash. Personally i could not
fathom forking out for celebrity trash nor for the un fact checked gibberish
that is posted throughout the day. Lately i would be lucky to check it once a
day for 30sec.

And i'm really skeptical if they could ever find scale to charge for online
access in an any Australian city market.

~~~
prawn
I used to check the site of the News Ltd paper in SA a number of times a day
but a couple of months ago I deleted all related bookmarks and feeds and went
cold turkey. I don't think I'm missing much. They bow down to the pageview
gods and, subsequently, the quality of their material is woeful.

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berryg
Isn't the metered system as adopted by the Financial Times simple to
circumvent? I simply open each article in an Incognito Window in Chrome and I
can read as many articles as I want.

~~~
jonknee
They could make it much more secure by requiring an account (which NY Times
already does).

~~~
robryan
Only way that will work is if you require everyone to make an account, which
won't do wonders for traffic. Maybe only showing the start of articles without
an account would be the only way to prevent people getting around it. Seems
useless to if you can just Google search an article and see it anyway.

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wallflower
My prediction: A gorgeous interactive iTablet magazine app with the software
written by Apple and the content provided by the NYTimes, Sports Illustrated,
etc.

At least, I'm hoping the content producers don't try to make their own (as in
iPhone). A standard iTablet newspaper/magazine app would make the experience
consistent. In the iPhone apps, it's pretty fragmented right now in terms of
quality and experience.

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nfnaaron
I don't think advertising for "a paper" will ever be as lucrative as the old
paper days, because it's too easy to drift over to the billion other sites on
the web.

The old paper days allowed for virtual monopolies because it was physically
inconvenient to have more than three or four papers at hand, and most people
only had one. It was easier to convince an advertiser that a reader was going
to at least glance through every section and be exposed to the ads.

These days I never read a news outlet's site all the way through[1], not in
the way I used to sit on the floor on Sunday with paper and coffee. A news
outlet has at most two or three articles' chance at getting my eyes to glide
over an advertisement. I will never see 99% of what's on a site before I move
on to some other site. Google is the only one making money this way.

[1] Except for Hacker News. I think aggregation points the way to where the
money is in the future, both aggregation of content and aggregation of ads.

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philk
I wish them luck but given the majority of people read newspapers for
entertainment/distraction I have no idea how they'll compete with the
avalanche of free content online.

Personally I'd pay good money for a paper that did lots of investigative
reporting (and only investigative reporting) but I suspect I'm in the
minority.

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diggboard
They should start charging Google to index their content, not the readers. If
I were an advertiser on nytimes.com I would be livid right about now.

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anamax
> They should start charging Google to index their content, not the readers.

Why would Google pay? There's very little in the NYT that is unique. How may
people would switch to another search engine if Google ignored the NYT?

Google delivers eyeballs for free. The NYT is free to monetize said eyeballs
as it sees fit.

~~~
s3graham
While I wouldn't pay if I were Google either, and I won't be subscribing to
the NYT, I think it's Google that derives the most business value from being
able to index NYT content: they get answers to give to their consumers, and
they get something valuable for "free" that they sell a large volume of ads
against.

