I think there's a super business model buried in all this.
Have a paywall, but make it "porous" enough that students can circumvent it fairly easily, while full-time workers really couldn't be bothered. The price also has to be low enough so that payment is a no-brainer for the full-time workaday types.
You hook people while they're students, then make it super-convenient for them to sign up for payment. If I were the NYT, I'd make it super-easy to pay subscriptions through iOS devices, then have convenient utilities that make all the other connections "just work."
Above all, this is the wrong way to be looking at the problem.
Hitting numbers of subscribers is only one piece of a solution. Over the period of time the paywall has been in effect, uniques and pageviews have declined at the same rate (about 20%) even with a porous paywall. The original thinking was that uniques would stay about the same while pageviews declined from freeloaders.
This has the potential to significantly dent their ad revenue figures and completely offset their revenue raised from online subscriptions if this trend is prolonged.
"Hitting numbers of subscribers is only one piece of a solution. Over the period of time the paywall has been in effect, uniques and pageviews have declined"
But does that actually matter? If they're making more money from the subscribers, and figures are high enough, why care about pageviews?
My understanding is that some (maybe many) of those subscriptions are heavily discounted which might be why they are advertising subscription numbers, rather than revenues.
Have a paywall, but make it "porous" enough that students can circumvent it fairly easily, while full-time workers really couldn't be bothered. The price also has to be low enough so that payment is a no-brainer for the full-time workaday types.
You hook people while they're students, then make it super-convenient for them to sign up for payment. If I were the NYT, I'd make it super-easy to pay subscriptions through iOS devices, then have convenient utilities that make all the other connections "just work."