New York Times Exploring how to Charge for Content 332
Mr. Christmas Lights writes "According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times is
mulling subscription for Internet Archives. It doesn't appear that the free (but subscription required - BugMeNot to the rescue!) ability to read NYT articles less than a week old would change. However, instead of paying $2.95 per article for stuff that is more than a week old, one idea being floated is an annual fee of $49.99 for unlimited access to anything in the last year." (More below.)
Mr. Christmas Lights continues "The WSJ has been pretty successful with their online subscriptions - over 700,000 people currently pay $79 ($39 if you get the print edition) a year for full online access of the last 30 days of articles - the story above happens to be in their public area. But they are a notable exception, with media organizations struggling to charge for News now that it is widely available for free on the Internet. For example, Slashdot recently discussed the AP's plan to charge members to post content online. Will the "GoogleZon" end up replacing the 4th Estate as depicted in the entertaining and informative 8 minute EPIC video?"
Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I for one... (Score:2, Insightful)
English guy.
Their best bet (Score:4, Insightful)
Library? (Score:2, Insightful)
And online advertising is on the rise (Score:5, Insightful)
Circuit Cellar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Library? (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet Adversising (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Their best bet (Score:2, Insightful)
And you would identify that 1 'right' article you need how? By paying $2.95*n until you find it?
Perhaps that works if you already know which article you're looking for, but I don't think 'research' often works that way.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Only go back one year? (Score:2, Insightful)
I would be a bit more inclined to pay for a news service, if I had access to an archive that could go back a little further than a year.
Re:The free internet is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
The faster the processor, the better the connection, the more money you spend on getting the most up to date, modern, super-duper computer... the quicker the ads come across, the more spam you get.
You know the old saying: "A sucker is born every minute," we can rehash that to: "A sucker spends money on information that can be retrieved elsewhere for free every minute."
The free internet died many years ago, probably around 1995 when AOL decided to give its users access to usenet.
Wondering... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
maybe garden variety news consumers not the target (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to micropayments? (Score:3, Insightful)
Subscriptions are stupid, because unless you're going to use $50/year you aren't going to bother taking out a subscription, and will instead go elsewhere. Subscriptions force you to make a choice: am I "A NYT Subscriber" or not? If I'm just dropping by the NYT site (eg, from a random newsblog link), I'm not going to fork out a $50.00 subscription to view a single article. Could I view that same single article for, say, $0.25, I'd happily pay it.
Affordable (and truly micro) micropayments allow you to use what you want, when you want, so you can "impulse-buy" information however you want. Subscriptions force you to enter into a long-term commitment, and as such will be avoided liek the plague by everyone apart from those who likely *already* have a NYT subscription (a much smaller subset of users).
Ok, $3.00 per article is hardly micropayments, but if I were NYT I'd be looking to move towards MPs, rather than away from them. It does look like they're confusing "overpricing their content" with "the failure of their whole approach".
Re:Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
If people are accessing it...
LexisNexis makes a fortune charging for access to their gigantic database of outdated content... why shouldn't NYT try to get a piece of the pie?
Re:Library? (Score:3, Insightful)
But you are attending a university - most people are not currently attending a university - so this service would be more valuable to them.
As for your comments about most libraries having microfilm/fiche going back to the 1890's - well I would need numbers to believe that. While many university libraries go a ways back - local free libraries tend to not keep that kind of archive on hand.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but I don't get this attitude. Do people really think that news should be free?
Newspapers are very important to our society. It is the only medium in which the reader is actually paying for the news they receive. Why is that important? Well, strangely enough, just about everyone works to serve the interests of the people paying them. TV news, especially Cable networks, aren't paid for by the people watching -- just the advertisers. Newspapers are partly paid for by advertising, but they wouldn't exist without paid subscribers.
Try this experiment at home:
Buy a newspaper, say the NYT for example. Then check sites like CNN, Fox, etc. to see if they are carrying anything like the depth of stories you see in the newspaper. I'll bet that on the International News and Business side you won't find more than 60-70% of the stories on the news websites. For local news, try comparing your local paper to your local TV news website. It'll be just simply embarassing for the TV guys.
Now, try to tell me that 14 cents a day isn't worth the difference in coverage between Print and TV/Online coverage.
They're forgeting the google factor... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, google is based on linking. Right now, no one links to the NYTimes unless it's today's article. If they allowed free access to their entire past archive, people would be posting links all the time (ex, an anti-Bush site would have a series of links about him from the past few years). This would translate into advertising revenue for the Times and more internet clout in general.
The way they've set it up now, this doesn't exist. And I don't believe there is a big market for paying for old news (not that big anyway). Students and researchers use libraries, people at home use Wikipedia or whatever.
The NYTimes should be working to be THE information news resource of world events.
who is stupid? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not the person who asks who is stupid. It's the person who pays.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you have to have the hardware and the storage space but it does NOT cost $2.95/issue.
If you want people to use the service and get the information then make it priced reasonably. I know that I have posted about this before but I will repeat it: If you want to keep your users and don't want them to go to a competitor don't do this...
Re:Library? (Score:3, Insightful)
Your question should be, "Why should I pay for these services twice?"
And the answer is, you can choose to pay the source directly, or you can pay for it indirectly and put up with the inconvenience of having to go to your library and work with microfiche rather than surfing their website from the comfort of your own home. If that's worthwhile to you, then paying might be in your interest.
For most people, I suspect that it's not. I think we'll be seeing a lot of people copy-pasting the entire content of an article to their blogs in order to preserve it for purposes of personal use, review, criticism, and discussion. And then we'll see a slew of copyright lawsuits to try to quash these exercises of fair use.
The ideal solution, to my mind, would be if you could log into the NYT site from home using credentials supplied by your local public library. People without access to libraries but who do have access to the internet could still pay, or get the fresh content for free and save a copy to their local system for any "fair use" needs.
Of course, if the NYT is really only going to archive back a single year with their online content, they'll hardly continue to remain the "newspaper of record" that they've been since forever.
Re:Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
You've got a good idea there, but you have to remember that these guys are scared shitless of losing their revenue streams. As the print subscriptions (and advertising revenue) inevitably decline, they want something familiar to be in control off. They already do web advertising, so the actual quantities they could increase their google juice and web revenue is a big scary question mark in their eyes.
I think there's definite wisdom they could take from your idea though... lose the stupid registration and bump free access to two weeks or a month to increase linkage. For older content they should continue to offer the $2.95 per article as well as several subscription choices. $50/yr for 100 articles or $20/month for unlimited access seem like the best choices. The $50/yr for access only to one year's worth of articles seems lame to me, but maybe some people need that kind of reasearching ability?
Busking (Score:2, Insightful)
It strikes me that the internet is like street performance. You make a noise. If people like the noise you should provide a simple system for people to provide a small sum of money.
Surely this is the business model that should be adopted by the arts on the internet. People already earn a living busking, and thats just performing on a busy high street, with the internet there is the potential to busk to the world.
Accountants may hate this model, but with the huge variety of GDPs and age ranges that have access to the internet it appears the fairest
Just to be clear Busking is an English word for street performer (not sure if our American friends use it).
Re:The free internet is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
Once we finally blocked them all out, and thus taken away one of the more important reasons a website can deliver content for free, we whine again when they are starting to charge money.
I myself am quite happy with searching for free sources, taking the (imo, not too obtrusive) ads for granted.
Your must be a Linux user. (Score:5, Insightful)
One of these people who's time is worthless. For the rest of us, spending $50 for 1 year's access is a better deal than spending an hours time going to the library for an article.
Re:Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
They've let that status to go thier head, in the case of the NY Times and in the case of other "vital" news agencies like Reuters and the BBC so that they feel they can craft the news or spin it how they feel is right.
As for the TV and Radio news being paid for by advertisers...gee...last time I looked in the NY Times or Wall Street Journal there were advertisements in those mediums as well.
The News should be free. The archives should be free.
Good news for the Wall Street Journal (Score:4, Insightful)
If they charge for subscription, they are in danger of losing a vast portion of their readership, and no longer be the paper of record (well, they may still be the Paper of Record, but the distinction won't be important. They will no longer be the News Source of Record). They are competing with AP, Reuters and the BBC in this realm, all of which will continue to pump out all the international news anyone could hope for.
If the NYTimes hopes to justify the expense by touting it's higher-quality product, it will have to explain how it's reporting standards are lower then the WSJ and magazines like The Economist, both of which have far better reporting then The Gray Lady.
The price isn't horrible in the abstract, it's that the paper isn't worth the price. I often consider subscribing to the WSJ at $70/year. It is possible that one of the main reasons I don't subscribe is that the NYTimes is available for free. If the NYTimes starts charging, the result, for me, would probably be a subscription to the WSJOnline.
So, in order to compete with the WSJ, the NYTimes may be forced to improve it's product. That is not a bad thing, at all. Although it will be a lot of work, the NYTimes has a better chance of reaching a $50/yr value then most other online news sources.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Idiots (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or... (Score:2, Insightful)
Add Historical New York Times and it's worth it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope they can make a go of it.
Everyone is a monday morning quarterback when it comes to journalism, but what most people don't realize is that good journalism is hard. Like, really hard. Exhausting. The workflow of a journalist is: conceive of story; research story, find sources, interview sources; write story. You do this independently, usually with little or no help from your editor. If you're in the news department, you do this in one day, sometimes multiple times in a day. And you repeat this every day you're at work. It's really, really hard, and lots of people burn out.
This is a little bit like a manager saying to a coder, "Can you build me a killer app? How long will that take - a few days maybe?" No matter what people on the sidelines think of the profession, getting into the NY Times means being a journalist at the top of your game. They should be paid well, and the paper has every right to generate revenue in whatever way they can.
Quality News = Slashdot and Blogs (Score:5, Insightful)
I find Slashdot fascinating because of the comments. Yes there are idiots, but there are also very intelligent people making intelligent comments. Where do you get that in newspapers? Newspapers have a single editor (or small team) with certain slants.
Take for example anything that Fox news produces. There is a slant in their news. Can anybody critique the comments Fox news has made? No, because they control the medium and the reactions. With Slashdot and Blogs that is simply not the case. Slashdot and blogs represent the voices of the people! And after all is that not what the news is all about, the people?
Re:Idiots (Score:1, Insightful)
On the one hand you're saying old news has no value, and on the other you're whining that it should be free. How, exactly, does that make the Times the idiot?
Re:Or... (Score:2, Insightful)
The traditional media's creation of it's product is what I don't like. While everyone rails against, oh say FoxNews, for having a bias, they think nothing of picking up the New York Times or reading the BBC and thinking that's the goddamned truth. It's not, it's a crafted product. New York Times has been doing it for decades. Walter Duranty, the Times' chief correspondent in Moscow from 1922 to 1941, who was widely praised in his day for his "dispassionate, interpretative reporting of the news from Russia." Duranty willingly participated in the Soviet campaign to cover up and deny the disaster, he then also spearheaded the effort to slander those correspondents who reported accurately on the famine.
Peter Arnett made up quotes from American Soliders in Vietnam, including the famed ""We had to destroy the village in order to save it." He made up Operation Tailwind and remained able to work in the Traditional Media. Jayson Blair and Charlie LeDuff get to make up quotes, steal stories and they become the "record" from these created productions.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
FYI, a 20 oz soft drink does not cost anything near a $1.09 or more, but people routinely pay that or more for them.
To me, its not a matter of the $2.95 per article that is turning people off. Its the inconvenience of paying that for an article that may or may not be exactly what you are looking for.
In other words, I would pay an annual fee for an excellent service like Google, but I would be damned if I would reach into my wallet every time I hit the search button.
What may be a working alternative for the NYTimes is for them to somehow verify that the contact info is real (I can't tell you how many times I've registered with every random answer possible, but thats another story) so that they can allow something like 5 or so archived articles per month for free, but send you a monthly bill for people that go beyond the 5. Kinda like using 411 on your phone or something.
I really am interested in what will become of the serial print media. Newspaper subscriptions have been falling for years due to TV news channels and the internet, yet there is still a need for a local news for things like classified ads and local advertising and news, but that need is much lower than it used to be, but it has not become obsolete nor do I see it as becoming obsolete in the near future.
Oh, maybe they will just follow the model of other changing business models and make their revenue via lawsuits of their customers or potential customers. That is always an option.
Re:Quality News = Slashdot and Blogs (Score:3, Insightful)
So you can rail against Fox News, but if I were to say Reuters has as much bias as Fox News because of Reuters word selections in say, terrorists, I have to write 1000 words on it and even then I'm ignorant. But if I say...Fox News sucks! That's all that needs to be said.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. The problem with a cost per article model is that it interferes with the way we are accustomed to using the web. An article sparks a thought, which causes me to search the web for related information, which uncovers a possibly related article, which sparks a refined thought, etc., etc.
Anyway for $50 a year for access to the NYT archive I'd sign up today.
Re:The free internet is dead (Score:3, Insightful)
If your site has content worth taking my time to seek out and read, and you have tasteful ads which are related to the content (thereby presupposing I'd be interested in what you're peddling), I'm more than happy to look at them (and I've even been known to follow their links occasionally). But, if i have to look a some stupid, flashing animation out of the corner of my eye while I'm trying to concentrate on the content of an article, I get annoyed very quickly. It would be one thing if I could "unclick" the Play or Loop option for those things but somehow they still play and loop. I've been known to print the article out just to read it without distractions before.
I am your customer. If you treat me with disrespect, I will move on and not come back *cough*Real Player*cough*. The reason I paid for Pithhelmet was so that I could go out of my way to block ads when I'm using Safari. The reason I downloaded AdBlock was so I could go out of my way to block ads when I'm using FireFox. The reason I go out of my way (and am willing to pay for ad blocking software, it that web sites have abused advertising (and me) to such and extent that I will do almost anything to avoid it.
There would be no need for these types of measures if advertisers and site-owners had respect for me as their customer. If they now feel they must charge for content, fine. I am your customer, set the pricing respectfully. I'm not stupid, I can buy the whole paper with current news for a buck fifty. You want to charge me $3 for an oudated article that cost $.000002 to manage, store and retrieve? I'll go elsewhere, thanks.
Re:Or... (Score:2, Insightful)
On top of that, you want the providers to be accountable for what they provide; this is the essence of capitalism vs communism. If the government pays for these free news sources, who decides how much each source gets? Why not let the market decide how much each news source is worth, through the age-old tried and true method of paying for services you deem worthy. Screw your "right" to anything.
Re:Or... (Score:3, Insightful)
C'mon... "Research" is a pretty vague term. What were you doing research FOR? If it was a term paper for an undergraduate class, then yeah, you can skip sources that cost money. But if you're, say, a professional journalist or PhD candidate you're going to pay whatever it costs to get the article you need from the New York Times archive, Even if you can get the same story free from somewhere else. A NYT source carries a lot more weight than the Toledo Ombudsman.