Most observers see the effort as doomed to fail before it starts
Those of you who are accustomed to reading The New York Times for free online as voraciously as you would the print version – in other words, multiple stories, every day – are going to find yourselves in a position of either paying for the privilege or turning elsewhere for your news.
Times management is banking that many of you will choose the former.
From a Times story announcing this new pay wall plan:
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up a vast majority of the site’s traffic.
Once readers click on their 21st article, they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages – $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app, $20 for Web access and an iPad app or $35 for an all-access plan.
All subscribers who receive the paper through home delivery will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Subscribers to The International Herald Tribune, which is The Times’s global edition, will also have free digital access.
“A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the Web,” Arthur Sulzberger Jr., chairman of The New York Times Company, said in his annual State of The Times remarks, which were delivered to employees Thursday morning.
“This move is an investment in our future,” he said. “It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation, while maintaining our large and growing audience to support our robust advertising business. And this system is our latest, and best, demonstration of where we believe the future of valued content – be it news, music, games or more – is going.”
Those bound and determined to avoid paying even after they hit the 20-story limit would appear to have workaround options available as the newspaper will not block readers who arrive at the site via social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter, or those arriving via search engines, although the Google route will be restricted to a maximum of five per day.
Meanwhile, the newspaper may have to mend fences with Canadian readers once our friends to the north fully absorb the fact that they are the designated guinea pigs in this latest pay wall experiment. The 20-story limit begins ticking immediately for readers accessing the Times from Canada, “which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system goes live in the United States and the rest of the world.”
Reaction is predictably negative.
Rob Pegoraro at the Washington Post says:
“… the pricing here doesn’t quite add up. Why pay $35 for four weeks of All Digital Access when you can get that for free with a Sunday-only subscription, $15 for the same period of time?
The segregation of access by types of device also looks odd. How many people own an iPad but not a smartphone? It makes a little more sense to separate Web-only subscriptions from those that involve app access, however. The Times has to fork over 30 percent of iPhone and iPad app subscriptions to Apple if they’re purchased through its App Store, which I expect will be the easiest and most obvious way to pay in each program.
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal notes that there are already moves afoot to give freeloaders a boost over the pay wall:
So, cheapskates, meet @freenyt, a three-hour old Twitter feed that intends to tweet all the Times stories.
“The New York Times paywall begins March 28 http://nyti.ms/eIJC8z. But you can access articles for free if they’re posted to Twitter…” messages posted to the account read. “Can you guess where they’ll be posted? ‘Information wants to be free’ – Stewart Brand.”
And Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing has nothing but bad things to say about it on a post headlined: New York Times paywall: wishful thinking or just crazy?
Here’s hoping the critics are proven wrong.
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