NY Times Confident of 'First Click Free' Paywalls 193
eldavojohn writes "One thing you might notice on Slashdot is that when someone submits a story linking to nytimes.com, it doesn't always work. While it's not truly a paywall, it appears to stop the user and require registration... sometimes. If you noticed this and it's seems to be non-deterministic in when and where it asks you to login, you're simply noticing the latest strategy of 'first click free' being employed. We've heard that normal paywalls are a miserable failure (the Wall Street Journal's, one of the more successful, only lets you see the first paragraph online). Will the drug pusher approach work out for The New York Times? The CEO seems to be certain that this blogger (and Slashdot) friendly paywall is the correct option and will keep The New York Times as a 'part of the conversation' online when news is rapidly circulating."
I will tell you that if I am asked for a password, I almost always reject the story immediately, or go find a better URL. Heck, yesterday I rejected a NY Times story for this exact reason. So we'll see how it pans out.
If You Want an Example (Score:5, Informative)
The Slash code seems to adjust my links sometimes and I've told CmdrTaco about this but it's really evident on nytimes.com articles.
Re:Pay For The Internet? (Score:1, Informative)
WSJ is so easy to work around its funny (Score:3, Informative)
I take the title of the shortened article, paste it into Google, and usually I find a version in the first two entries that allows me to read the entire article. It must be a barrier to the lazy.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:4, Informative)
Depends. I already pay for The Economist as a news source. Sure, there are plenty of other places to get "breaking news" online. If I want to read high quality journalism ... less so. When the NYT goes proper paywall, I'll pay. When the Daily Mail does, I'll rejoice ;-)
-P
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:1, Informative)
For a simple technical reason, sites want to be accessible by google. Just set your user agent to googlebot and paywalls disappear.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:5, Informative)
The AP is NOT the source, the newspapers are. AP is owned by the newpapers. AP gets it's stories from the member newpapers (they also have some of their own reporters). When there are no newspapers, there is no AP.
Losing subscribers and advertisers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pay For The Internet? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:5, Informative)
What does the NYT (or any large paper) offer me that I can't get straight from the source (AP) for free? They haven't been doing much real journalism in years, so I'm at a loss.
If you think that, it's because you don't actually read the New York Times.
I'm looking at the NYT homepage right now. There are three wire stories. Everything else is original work by one or more New York Times reporters.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:3, Informative)
No. The AP is owned by the newspapers. All of it's funding comes from the member newspapers. Yes, there are some 'AP' reporters who are not working for a specific paper, but they are still paid by the collective of the papers.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:3, Informative)
You realize that the cost or printing & distributing the paper book is a fairly small fraction of the cost of publishing it, right? Most of the cost of creating the book has nothing to do with the mechanics of putting ink on paper - proofing, layout, art, editing, author royalties - all of this is still a part of the process, regardless of the form the final product takes.
Looking at Barnes & Noble's web site, a quick scan of paperback books indicates that many of them are priced in the $12-$15 US range, versus $9.99 for an ebook version. The difference between an ebook and a paperback book is - of course - that the publisher doesn't incur printing, distribution, and warehousing costs, but that could very well be covered by the discount of $3-5 per copy. Why would you expect the price of an ebook to be so much lower than the cost of a paperback, given that printing, distribution, and warehousing are the only parts of the publication process that they eliminate (or have a chance to save significantly on - server infrastructure & distribution still costs them *something*, just much less than shipping bricks of paper around.)
I don't understand this argument that somehow because something is in digital form, it should "be almost free" - if you value the content, the value, and much of the cost, is *in the content* not in physical medium the content is distributed on/in. Why is $9 a vastly unreasonable price for an ebook, given all of the effort from numerous people that must go into producing that book, and where printing & distribution are some of the smallest parts of the cost?
Re:I dissent (Score:1, Informative)
Google it [google.com]
Read it at:
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article827154.ece
and a dozen other places.
Re:Pay For The Internet? (Score:2, Informative)
Here comes the myth. "Advertising will pay for it".
Advertising paid (and pays) for radio, for TV (OTA Free TV may be on the way out, but that's only because of limited broadcast range and the success of cable and satellite 'services'), for magazines and pays for lots of other things things. It's no myth. I have web sites online and have since 1996. They all pay for themselves through advertising alone and I do quite well, thank you. There are many ways to monetize a business in addition to advertising, as well. For musicians it may be concerts, as an example of how free music can work for a musician or band.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:3, Informative)
I'm basing this off of numbers available from self-publishing / publish-on-demand services, and conversations with a girl I dated for a while who worked as an editor for a fairly large publishing company that does much of its business in paperbacks.
Most of the small offset printing services seem to run somewhere around $3/unit for runs of ~2000 units; Price-per-unit declines as the volume of the run goes up, and it's trivially obvious that a large publishing company will have high-volume arrangements with printers, further reducing their costs.
Many of these mass-market paperbacks sell for $10-15, making the physical printing costs approach ~10-20% of the total unit cost (actual numbers could even be lower for some books & publishing companies). And yet there's this assumption that eliminating printing from the process, but nothing else, should reduce the price of the book by 50-75%.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:3, Informative)
Enough people will pay, especially for the New York Times.
I wouldn't be so sure. They already tried to implement a limited pay wall called "Time Select" in 2005 and was discontinued after two years. The most prominent thing that was charged for was their Op-Ed columnists (Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, et al.), and guess what, they all complained bitterly about it because it greatly decreased their readership and influence. In Friedman's words, "I hate it. It pains me enormously because it’s cut me off from a lot, a lot of people, especially because I have a lot of people reading me overseas, like in India ... I feel totally cut off from my audience." However, the main reason for its failure seemed to be a recognition that subscription fees did not make up for the loss of ad revenue from decreased traffic.
Why they think a pay wall will work any better now is beyond me. My best guess is that they figure with more people using mobile devices and e-readers that more people will be willing to pay, but from what they are describing, I'd think they'd get an even bigger drop off in traffic from the new pay wall. Time(s) will tell.
Re:Why the paywall won't work (Score:3, Informative)
Um, you contradict yourself a bit there. On those occasions where one of the AP's 'own reporters' writes a story, the AP *is* the source. This is akin to war or political-campaign news stories relying on a 'pool' reporter. On short-term work (chilean miners), a nearby journo or freelancer is often put on contract for the duration.
As for GP, there are fewer papers and news agencies assigning reporters and sportswriters and etc elsewhere. Sharing / pooling writers and photographers is cheaper. The NYT, Reuters, news mags, etc still put reporters on assignment, at which point THEY ARE the source. While NYT's reporter count is way down, they're still their own primary sources on a LOT of content.