NYtimes.com going behind paywall

[Asher]

Starting today in Canada, 20 items per month for free on the website. Their subscription rate is twice that of unlimited Netflix streaming. And that doesn't even include smartphone or tablet viewing.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repor...rticle1945653/

N.Y. Times unveils pay wall: Canada first

The New York Times Co. (NYT-N9.190.333.72%)has finally unveiled details about the long-awaited pay wall plan for its website, in a bid to begin drawing revenue from readers online – and it’s coming to Canada first.

The plan to charge for articles on the newspaper’s website was announced last year. In January 2010, the company said it would implement a payment plan for the Web starting some time in 2011. On Thursday, the Times said that the pay plan will launch in Canada immediately, and will come to the rest of the world on March 28.

The newspaper appears to be using Canadian readers as guinea pigs for the paid Web experience. “The Times is launching digital subscriptions in the Canadian market beginning today in order to fine-tune the customer experience prior to the global launch,” the company said in a statement.

As expected, readers will still be allowed to access a certain amount of articles on the website for free, but there is now a limit. Once a reader has viewed 20 articles in a given month, that reader will be asked to pay to keep the site open. All print subscribers – whether they get weeklong delivery or only weekends – will get everything digital for free if they register their accounts.

Digital subscriptions start at $15 (U.S.) for four weeks. That base plan gives full access to the website as well as a New York Times application for smart phones. That is the plan currently available to Canadians. At the time of the global launch, two other plans will also be available: $20 for reading on the website and on the application for tablet devices such as the iPad, and $35 for access across all digital and mobile platforms.

“Our decision to begin charging for digital access will result in another source of revenue, strengthening our ability to continue to invest in the journalism and digital innovation on which our readers have come to depend,” The New York Times Co. chairman and publisher of the paper Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. said in a statement. “This move will enhance The Times's position as a source of trustworthy news, information and high-quality opinion for many years to come.”

This is yet another kick at the can for The New York Times’s pay wall. It tried to charge for digital access in 1996, but only attracted roughly 4,000 digital subscribers. It was scrapped. Then in 2005 the paper launched the TimesSelect service, asking for $50 (U.S.) a year to read content by the paper's columnists on the website. Far more readers bought in that time, and TimesSelect pulled in roughly $10-million annually. But limiting how many people look at the site also limits its attractiveness to advertisers. Web ad revenue fell, and that experiment ended in 2007.

Now The Times is trying again, but will still have to strike that balance between pulling in revenue from readers and hurting its ad sales. In a research note released in January looking forward to the pay wall, UBS analyst John Janedis, who has a Sell rating on the company’s stock because of a weak print environment, estimated roughly 20 per cent of the paper’s digital advertising revenues could be at risk. Pricing is also an issue, he wrote.

“We think there is a fine balance between pricing too high & limiting new [subscriptions] vs. too low and cannibalizing the print version, though potentially significantly increasing subscriptions.”

Other news outlets currently work on the pay wall model – most prominently the Wall Street Journal, which usually charges $2.99 per week for access to its website. In an interesting bit of timing, the site is currently promoting a special discount for Canadian subscribers who sign up now. It’s offering the site for $1.99 per week – still higher than The Times’s initial promotional price, which starts at 99 cents (U.S.) for four weeks before raising up to the regular price.

But many other websites, offer much of their Web content for free. The iconic New York-based paper has been a bellwether for the industry in the past; the question now is whether other news outlets will follow its lead and begin launching their own digital subscriptions.

Fail.

[MikeH]

http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/02/tim...llion-readers/

[gribbler]

Do they realize people can get news for free?

[Ming]

The current pricing structure seems absurd, and is probably doomed to failure as is.

However... they are moving down the right path. With the death of newspaper print, they HAVE to come up with alternative sources of revenue. Internet Ad sales alone can not support the type of news network the NYT wants to have.

The decline in physical newspaper sales has to be made up somewhere, and charging for content can do that.
But, as usual, they are asking far too much and the use of multiple levels based on device access is simply crazy.
They should be charging a single fee for unlimited access.

Now, you may laugh at the 15 dollar per month (four weeks) cost... but that isn't unrealistic. As it is now, hundreds of thousands of people currently pay over 7 dollars a week to get the daily NYT outside of NY. NYT readers are a loyal bunch. Even as circulation in New York continues to fall, circulation outside of New York does pretty well. There is a large audience in the US and globally that wants what the NYT has to offer. If they can get the pricing right without trashing too much of the online revenue...

[MikeH]

That's what happened with The Times.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

and do they still have the readership?

In any case I see this as a declining business model... the "faithful" will joing and pay, while the majority will ignore and use other "free" in other words, ad, and otherwise supported news sources, until those behind the paywall die out in a decade or two...

it may be another nail in the "traditional journalism" coffin, but the new infrastructure can and will support different business models which will be both valuable and "free" for the readers.

[Ming]

and do they still have the readership?

Yes... they still have excellent readership.

In any case I see this as a declining business model... the "faithful" will joing and pay, while the majority will ignore and use other "free" in other words, ad, and otherwise supported news sources, until those behind the paywall die out in a decade or two...

It doesn't matter if the majority continue to use the free and limited version. It just means online advertising revenue.
But as noted, online ad revenue just isn't enough to support a major international newspaper/news source.

What is important is the type of readers the NYT currently has... Rich ones. They have a very upscale audience, and most would have no problem dishing out such paltry sums to get their beloved NYT. Right now, the NYT has as much if not more circulation outside of NY than with the city. There are many reasons for this... respected journalism, ex New Yorkers who can't live without their taste of NY, and the financial and business community.

As far as a decade or so from now... who knows. But right now, and in the next couple of years, the NYT must do something like this if they wish to continue as they are now, and not have to make even more cuts to their actualy news structure.

[OzzyKP]

I think it is a good option really. They aren't going entirely behind a paywall, for casual folks like me who probably don't exceed 20 articles a month it'll be just fine. Then they can try to stay in business on the backs of those folks Ming talks about who wouldn't have a problem paying.

[Ming]

I thought 20 was a pretty good figure. Enough for people to check stuff out and still keep their online ad revenue going.

But that isn't enough for businesses which use the NYT as a source of information. I could go through 20 in a few days for business related matters. While many current newspapers couldn't get away with this, the NYT and WSJ can. Both are "considered" vital sources of information for the business community.

[Asher]

The easy solution is to have multiple accounts. When you reach the limit, switch.

[Ming]

Many people will do that... but many upscale people and business probably won't... too much effort

[notyoueither]

This would be more palatable if the NYT, WSJ, ToL, and a few others offered a passport where $20 per month got you access to all of them.

Would probably result in a greater signup than for the sum of them seperately too.

[Ming]

Well... as it is with most negotiations... it's stupid to start with a lowball cost. You can always lower the cost if it isn't selling, but it's much more difficult to raise the price if you think you started too low.

The real trick is to offer something that people want. Yeah, you can get "news" for free (and even lies if you go to FOX ) But people still want sources like the NYT, WSJ, FT, and others, and they are willing to pay "something" for it. Now, it's just a simple matter of how much.

Testing it in Canada was a good move. If they totally screw it up, no great loss...

[notyoueither]

I'm unlikely to sign up to any of them due to the hassle, and the ability to get quality elsewhere.

I would sign up for a single service that gave me access to all of them for a reasonable price.

They could turn the hordes of people like me, who have never paid a cent for any of their products into paying subscribers, if they make it simple enough. That would be their furture and how they could make this work well, and not just be rent collection on the way to the grave yard.

[notyoueither]

A single passport would also make it easier to add subscribers from other countries in the English speaking world.

The Globe and Mail would love to go to paid subscription, but they can't because there are too many other options for Canadians.

If the G&M could join a network I am pretty sure they could bring in more total Canadians than would pay for individual subscriptions to all of them and the G&M on their own, combined. I'm thinking many more, actually. Multiples more. There would be real value in not only keeping access to the G&M, but gaining access to the rest.

[notyoueither]

BTW, I hearby claim ownership of my idea. TM, c, etc.

[Braindead]

I'm unlikely to sign up to any of them due to the hassle, and the ability to get quality elsewhere.

I would sign up for a single service that gave me access to all of them for a reasonable price.

They could turn the hordes of people like me, who have never paid a cent for any of their products into paying subscribers, if they make it simple enough. That would be their furture and how they could make this work well, and not just be rent collection on the way to the grave yard.

There is plenty of free news from the BBC.

BBC

[-Jrabbit]

US paywall starts March 28. I got the notice in my morning email.

Of note:
Tablets/mobiles will have free access only to the "top news" section sans subscription.
Articles linked via social media (FB/Tw) will get full access to that specific article (only).
Print subscribers get free total access.

This will severely limit my click-throughs to NYT. But a little creative social networking looks like it will circumvent their evil plan to stay in business.

[Cort Haus]

There is plenty of free news from the BBC.

BBC

British taxpayers gift to the world.

[notyoueither]

We give you back Celine Dion, Dob Cherry, and the CBC.

[Cort Haus]

Can you throw in Terrance and Philip?

[notyoueither]

We already did, or at least the idea for the caricature. It's a pretty good caricature, too.

[DanS]

The WSJ and FT are free. But you have to come to pay articles via Google News. I assume that the same will be the case with the NYT.

[notyoueither]

What?

I've Googled pay articles by headline and writer, and not had to pay.

edit: ah, I misread.

[Thorn]

Just put more advertising revenue as priority no good reason to pay for biased inaccurate opinions....

[Wezil]

Only a few days after the New York Times launched a paywall on its website for Canadian visitors, a Canadian programmer has come up with a free workaround to keep the site open to all, and it only took four lines of code.

David Hayes, a Kitchener, Ont., developer, cracked the paywall during his lunch break.

“It’s just a four-line script, plus a few more to allow me to update it,” he

said in an e-mail to QMI Agency on Tuesday. “I wrote it over lunch. I’m a little surprised it took off, over 5,000 people are using it so far and it’s

less than a day old.”

The code loads into a user’s browser as a button that looks like any other bookmark. When confronted with the paywall, users can click the button to reveal the full text of the article behind it.


“I think the NYT is in a tough position in that their status as a paper of

record needs people to be able to see the content, but their income stream is dependent on restricting access to that content,” Hayes said. “It’s very hard to show-but-hide.”

To block articles that users aren’t supposed to read, the Times simply

places a grey screen over the text and bounces a “please pay us” window in front of the user.

Hayes’s script prevents that screen and payment window from loading into the browser, while letting everything else load as normal.

As a developer at the Nieman Journalism Lab points out: “The other major news paywalls — WSJ, FT, The Economist — don’t actually send the entire forbidden article to your browser, then try cover it up with a couple lines of easily reversible code. They just hit you with a message saying, in effect, “Sorry, pay up here” whenever you stray past the free zone.”

Hayes’s program is called NYTClean and is currently only available on his website at euri.ca, which is currently slowing down significantly due to

heavy interest from would-be Times readers.

NYTClean isn’t the only way to get around the paywall, though. The newspaper’s site also allows free visits from anyone clicking on links distributed through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

The Times launched the Canadian paywall on March 17. It is expected to launch in the U.S. by the end of the month.

"Our digital subscriptions have been designed to allow a generous amount of content to be free through various methods, including the Web site, apps and links from third-party sites like social media, blogs and search," New York Times Company spokeswoman Kristin Mason wrote in an e-mail to QMI Agency.

"As with any paid product, we expect that there will be some percentage of people who find ways around our digital subscriptions. We will be monitoring the situation."

Hayes says he loves the Times — “It was literally the first page I bookmarked when I got on the Internet," he said — but he couldn't resist the paywall's challenge.

"It’s just an iron rule of nerd-dom, if you put an interesting looking wall in front of us, we’ll try to get around it.”

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/MediaNew.../17714806.html

[-Jrabbit]

Sweet.

[MikeH]

What an unbelievably weak technical solution to implementing a paywall.

Amazing that someone with their web resources could come up with something so weak.

[-Jrabbit]

Perhaps they had a clue. Perhaps that's why they tested the wall in Canada - so Asher could crash it before they tried in the US.

[Wezil]

It's not surprising the guy who did it lives in Kitchener. Hi-tech area (U of Waterloo and RIM among others).