Why Paywalls Are Good, But NYT's Is Flawed 256
GMGruman writes "The New York Times has taken a lot of heat for daring to start charging for its product. (What nerve! Imagine if grocery stores, phone companies, or even employees began charging for their wares!) But the problem, InfoWorld columnist Galen Gruman argues, is that its paywall is poorly designed. It encourages unpaid usage in massive quantities via Twitter and other feeds, undermining its very purpose, and it makes multiple-device mobile users — the growing population — pay more than anyone else. Both should be fixed. But the more troubling underlying issue is that the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing. In mobile, there's a chance to fix that, but in the way is not just the Web's free-loader mentality but the pricing of carriers for data transport that take a larger chunk out of people's budgets than they should, making it that much harder for people to pony up for the value of the content they get through those carriers' pipes."
The real issue is that it's overpriced (Score:3, Informative)
Check out this comparison of digital subscription prices across different media:
http://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the-new
You'll notice that the NY Times is grossly overpriced.
Re:devalued content (Score:2, Informative)
In fairness, TV's not that way everywhere; in England, and the rest of the UK for that matter, the gov't taxes you for owning an operable receiver, and that money goes to the BBC, which is why they get Doctor Who and you get 500 mostly-crappy SF shows cancelled after one seaaon because they couldn't sell advertising due to crappy ratings. (Yes, I'm aware of Outcasts. And pissed off...)
I'm not saying I like the tax model (I really dislike it strongly), but advertising's not the only option, and I dislike the shift from "selling content to viewers" to "selling eyeballs to advertisers" it engenders -- it incentivizes sensationalism in news and LCD pap in entertainment.