

NYTimes: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions - rmah
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html

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thushan
The Times announced digital subscriptions today. Good move. The pricing -
backwards as all hell.

NYTimes.com + Smartphone = $15/month NYTimes.com + Tablet = $20/month
NYTimes.com + Tablet + Smartphone = $35/month (WHAT?)

First, how does one differentiate the value add between a smart phone and a
tablet enough to charge the sum of those parts, not an incremental addition?

Two, if you go with the cheapest print option (weekday) at $14.80 a month
delivered to your house, you get all access across all devices. As one of my
friends noted: how could they not look around and be inspired by digital
companies that have millions of users on a few dollars a month on drip....but
no. They still think of themselves as a print provider. Name another service
we pay $15 bucks a month to access from our smartphone.

This seems like a print centric decision.

~~~
neild
$14.80/month for the weekday-only print subscription is a 50% off deal that
lasts only three months. You'll be paying ~$30/month after that.

Which is, of course, still cheaper than the web+smartphone+tablet plan.

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natch
Wow, the pricing seems incredibly steep. I'm used to thinking twice before
subscribing to magazines, since $12/year per magazine adds up. But they are
talking about $8+ a _week_ \- wow. Good luck getting enough people to pay
that. And before someone starts talking about lattes, I don't buy lattes, for
the same reason. And I have a really good income.

~~~
jellicle
For comparison, a major national newspaper delivered to my door was just
offered for $1.50/week - six issues per week.

So: dead trees delivered to my door, six times per week: $1.50/week.

Bits which I have to go fetch myself, paying rather usurious bandwidth rates:
$8.75/week.

Hmmmm. Something seems off here.

~~~
dexen
The major source of revenue for press is ads. The difference in pricing may be
reflection of lower income from online ads, itself result of lower impact of
those.

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nanoanderson
I can't find any mention of whether advertisements will be shown to paying
customers. The "no-pay-but-view-ads" vs. "pay-with-no-ads" model has been a
mainstay of most freemium websites, but NYTimes looks like it's going to keep
ads no matter if you pay or not.

At $3.75 to $8.75 per week, I'd expect ads to be gone. Not that they need to
be. It's just what I've come to expect.

The news publication industry is changing (along with the rest of the
publication industry). I like the direction NYTimes is going in -- "For
quality content, you should expect to pay real money" -- but the model has so
much bad baggage attached to it that it seems doomed to failure, with The
Times (London) being the most recent NYTimes-scale example.

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Alex3917
Nice. For only $15 dollars a month I can get the latest updates on Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction and the virtues of warrantless wiretapping. What a
bargain.

~~~
tomjen3
Thank you.

It isn't free news that killed the newspapers.

It is their own so called news, which are mostly put there by pr companies or
else are outright lies by politicians.

~~~
Alex3917
To be fair though, the reason mainstream newspapers are mostly propaganda and
advertising is because they are free.

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cschmidt
If you have _any_ home delivery, then you get all the digital stuff for free.
Here's how the prices compare for delivery in my zipcode (Boston):

Daily Delivery (7 Days), $29.60 per four weeks

The Weekender (Friday–Sunday), $20.80 per four weeks

Sunday Only, $15 per four weeks

Weekday (Monday–Friday), $14.80 per four weeks

All Digital Access, $35 every four weeks

NYtimes.com + Tablet App, $20 every four weeks

NYtimes.com + Smartphone App, $15 every four weeks

So getting a weekday subscription at $14.80 gets you the $35 digital deal. I'm
sure they won't mind if this drives some extra dead tree subscriptions.

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joebadmo
I find it strange that no one seems to be talking about what his does to NYT's
google-juice/clout in the link economy. NYT peddles influence by being widely
read/the paper of record, but doesn't putting up a paywall directly mitigate
that? Ad-supported model seems to (for the most part) complement that; a
paywall opposes it.

~~~
gaius
This only affects people who read more than 20 articles/month. So the content
is actually all still there and linkable to the open web.

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brown9-2
Interesting how the prices (from
[http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.html\)are)
rated at "every four weeks" rather than "per month". A chance to squeeze out
one extra payment per year?

~~~
nanoanderson
They just seem to be following their print model for some sort of mental
connection in buyers used to paying for weekly newspaper subscriptions. It's
confusing to me to figure out as someone who prefers monthly installments (UK
rent is figured per week as well, then multiplied by 52, then divided by 12
for the monthly rent… so convoluted), but it's not totally bizarre for NYTimes
to bill this way.

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stuartjmoore
Their pricing seems too straightforward. $15 for .com and smartphone. $20 for
.com and tablet. $35 for .com, smartphone, and tablet. 35 = 15 + 20...

.com, smartphone, and tablet should be less than the first two combined.
Incentivise people to pay more by making it seem like less.

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muhfuhkuh
Seems fair to me. Eventually, freeloaders (myself included) will be relegated
to reading al-Jazeera, BBC News, NPR, and some random combination of
AP/Reuters/UPI via Google News.

Or, you know, some of us may pay.

~~~
gaius
BBC is paid for by the British taxpayer. Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari
royal family. Reuters news is a loss-leader for their financial services
business.

News is expensive! Don't be fooled that because commentary on news that others
have gathered (e.g. HuffPo) is essentially free that it doesn't cost real
money to send a reporter to some faraway place for 6 months to do some
investigative journalism, then fact-check it and write it up...

~~~
CallMeV
One tiny modifier to your comment.

The BBC is paid for by the British television license payer, not the taxpayer.
Otherwise, spot on. Journalists need to eat, too.

~~~
gaius
In practice there is no difference between the license and a tax. It's like
you can't own a car without paying for your MOT.

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nicksergeant
The real issue here is the the Times is just trying to find a way to pay for
their nice big NYC downtown tower. That and other typical newspaper-related
overhead, which used to be well within their operating budget, before the
internet.

The newspaper industry is the dying industry of our time, and desperation set
in a while ago. The NYT took a bit longer to appear desperate because of it's
generally more loyal readerbase and large coffers, while most small dailies &
weeklies have either drastically reduced overhead or completely packed up
already.

~~~
drewda
The Times already cashed out of much of their stake in the headquarters
building: <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123660214438270341.html>

And many newspapers still turn a reasonable profit, it's just that the major
metros can't earn enough to pay off all the debts left over from the major
consolidations at the start of the decade. One reference to that effect:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-
is-n...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-is-no-
cure_b_180356.html)

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pointillistic
Although I think this long overdue, and I support the move in this direction,
NYT is makings a big mistake by charging too much. The price should be $5.95
per month (perhaps a discount for seniors and students).

The problem is that they can't charge that little compared to the paper
delivery. Indeed, they must cut the paper cord and _think digitally_ , small
fee will multiply exponentially, worldwide.

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alexqgb
Wondering what this means for the constellation of links to old NYT pieces now
embedded in blogs around the world.

Assuming that following one would count against the 20 free articles per month
quota they've established, and that they're not planning an apocalyptic sweep
of millions of inbound links.

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drewda
The most interesting sentence is: "For some search engines, users will have a
daily limit of free links to Times articles." The question being which search
engines is The Times cutting deals with...

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drallison
Here is the letter sent to current digital subscribers.
<http://www.stanford.edu/~allison/nytimespaywall.html>

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joebananas
So, can Firefox extensions fiddle with referrer info? I think I just got an
idea for a new one.

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RandyHelzerman
I hope this works; if it does, it will be the best thing which has happened to
news in a long time. Companies produce product which is beneficial to their
customers; if those customers are large corporations buying advertisement,
their product will be beneficial to large corporations. If their customers are
you and me, spending $8 a week for news, they will produce product beneficial
to us.

