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."
Hey check out this article... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Hey check out this article... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Perhaps the Slashdot mentality towards security is not conducive to understanding what NYT is doing. It's perfectly possible they never intended for the paywall to work 100% to keep people out. They just made it less convenient to access the content free of charge. Perhaps the
devalued content (Score:2)
the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
...or maybe we're just moving to an open content model (i.e., like FOSS). After all, information does want to be free.
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Reporters need to eat, though.
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Reporters need to eat, though.
The reporters I've known used to eat and drink an awful lot on their expense accounts.
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And I think we can ALL agree that generating ad revenue is NEVER at odds with producing high-quality articles for people to read!
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It's a win-win for the company and the reporter if they can file it as business expenses rather than increased salary, but it comes from the same income. No income and they can't eat on or off the job...
Re:devalued content (Score:5, Insightful)
How many reporters do you know? I happen to know one or two writers for the NYT that make a pittance of a salary. Yes, they get reasonable expense accounts. Most journalists in this country would be lucky to have *that*.
And why do they get expense accounts? Why does anyone in any industry get an expense account? For one thing, it enables (in principle) the worker to perform their job better than they otherwise might. For a journalist, it's the opportunity to meet people over drinks and lunch, make connections, learn about things. You may consider this superfluous, but there are plenty of people who are willing to pay for journalism that realize it isn't.
Second, the accounts are a perk, yes. And why shouldn't they be? News and journalism works in free-markets like everything else. In every sector, you have people who do mediocre work, bad work, good work, and amazing work. Companies and markets strive to compensate them accordingly. So if you're a top tier journalist, who's to say a company shouldn't offer you an expense account to do your job? You can argue again that it's a waste, but you'd better toe the same line when it comes to every other business sector under the sun.
Journalists, editors, publishers, all are individuals who do potentially rough work (not in every case, but in some) that serves broader society in a way that is both practically relevant and creatively compelling. They deserve to be compensated, compensated well in some some cases, and not just by someone looking to make a buck off an ad placement on a blog.
Re:devalued content vs mediocre content (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd vaguely consider paying for really really good news and analysis -
But we need a heavily honest rating service that rates the content as useful.
A 7 page Economist article might get a 9 out of 10, while the ehow SEO'd stuff would be a 2.
Google is just starting to move in this direction re: their recent backlash against "content farms".
Re:devalued content (Score:4, Interesting)
News and journalism works in free-markets like everything else
But you do not want them to:
Journalists, editors, publishers, all are individuals who do potentially rough work (not in every case, but in some) that serves broader society in a way that is both practically relevant and creatively compelling. They deserve to be compensated
A free market system does not pay what is deserved, it pays for what there is demand.
At the moment there demand is falling as consumers switch to free alternatives.
People are quite happy to pay if the product is worth it: the Financial Times, The Economist, The New Scientist etc. have no problem getting people to pay because they have content that does not have a suitable free alternative, because they actually have a high quality product that is hard replace.
Most newspapers do little investigative journalism, and largely reproduce press releases, government announcements, and whatever else they are fed. The net lets us bypass them and read the original.
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And where, exactly, do you think the money for those expense accounts comes from?
Re:devalued content (Score:4, Interesting)
You read things like "Tokyo's drinking water is 10,000 times above normal radiation levels". Then you look into the numbers and see that the amount is so tiny, you'd have to drink yourself to death just to get a radioactive blip.
I say fuck em... It is not a pay wall. It is a wall to protect me from them.
If you have any data / news for the surrounding lands of the Fukushima power plant please let me know.
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ciderbrew wins the thread.
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It's easy to see
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OK, I'm prejudiced. I was once a paper boy. Because of this in college I used to read the San Francisco Chronicle from cover to cover every day of the week.
That kind of loyalty can lead to a rude awakening. The Chronicle turned from a reasonable paper into one spouting the latest fads, and spewing more misinformation than information. But I was loyal. And it got worse. Finally it was bought by Hearst, and got so bad I couldn't even read the front page anymore. Lies, misinformation, abuse, distortion
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Ad revenue seems to work well for google....
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We produce enough food to feed everyone. Let govt provide a basic income, so ppl can do what they really want to do instead of what a boss tells them to. Enough of us will want to do journalism because we love it that it will work.
Re:devalued content (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that's not true. You can go quite far by dispatching reporters to the scene of breaking news, but you really need somebody at the capital every day that congress is in session and somebody just hanging out at the various town halls of major cities in case something happens. And that isn't cheap, but if you don't do it, you're going to miss important stories on a fairly regular basis.
Additionally, a lot of stories only come to light because of the competitive nature of the industry wanting to beat everybody else to the story so as to have something to rub their nose in.
Re:devalued content (Score:4, Insightful)
I had actually planned on getting a subscription, but I rather doubt I will unless they change it. They're charging for an premium product, but not really delivering. The separate charges for different devices is incredibly stupid. I rather suspect (since they have yet to mention it) that it will contain advertising. And I'm sorry, the NYT has pretty annoying stop action/ overly gaudy / overly large / Flash ads (when I turn off ad block, that is). And NYT breaks every browser that I've ever used (albeit with NoScript and Adblock).
Maybe they will see the light, but I rather doubt it. I suspect that they will call it a success for a while then either collapse or change something.
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Well actually I'd hedge that by saying the mainstream media didn't highlight those positions. If you go back they did report on them.
Re:devalued content (Score:5, Insightful)
However, then the Reporters are wary of doing any reporting of anything negative of the sponsors.
Why Top Gear America will never gain traction like Top Gear UK (aside from the hosts sucking). They simply can't be critical of car companies in the same way without the car companies threatening to pull advertisements for the entire network.
Re:devalued content (Score:5, Insightful)
...like Top Gear UK...
Which is, incidentally, the best TV show...[long pause]...in the world.
Sometimes I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and practice my Clarkson-in-the-world voice. Other people do that too, right?
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one of us, one of us!
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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
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Except that thus far, with the notable exception of Google no company has successfully made any significant amount of money off of advertising on the Internet. Yeah, You can probably make enough to cover the hosting costs on your blog from advertising. If you are popular (write well, provide useful content, update regularly, etc) you might even be able to make enough to cover your hosting costs and make a decent living off advertising. So far though, no one has found a formula that scales that to the New
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Correction: no one who creates their own content has successfully made any significant amount of money off of advertising on the Internet. (I hate the FTFY meme).
Google makes money indexing other people's content and selling ads because it can be done cheaply. Bloggers, like Arianna Huffington, can make money linking to other people's news content because opinion can be cranked out pretty fast (and because it is less difficult to throw 60 hours a week at linking to interesting news stories and videos)...
But
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I agree... Reporters need to eat. They need to get paid. And the quality of the reportage should not be degraded.
This last part is a big problem however: the quality of reportage in this country is abominable. I wouldn't pay one red cent to read articles in most American papers, because they're so biased and so poorly-written and researched. I'll glance at them for free, just so I can keep up with what's going on, but that's it. It wasn't like this years and years ago, back in the days of Walter Kronkite
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You just cited a business model that no longer exists (free ad-supported TV) to defend a business model that NYT has been trying for ten years, while bashing them for moving away from that failed model...because you want them to try something new?
Just replace the word "information" with "porn" (Score:4, Insightful)
No, information (and porn) does not want to be free. That is a false premise.
People want information (and porn) to be free. Or to be more precise, people want everything they personally use to be free. It's called self-interest.
You just have to make information (or porn) worth paying for. That's hard to do when it's so easy to comparable information (or porn) for free elsewhere.
Just replace the word "information" with "porn" in all arguments and you get rid of the false moral calls that "free information serves a higher purpose" which is just an excuse for not paying for the benefit you get from the information.
Re:Just replace the word "information" with "porn" (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree with how pipatron interprets "Information wants to be free".
"Free" in this context means "to replicate". "Wants" in this context is in the same sense as genes or memes "want" to replicate. It is not the wants of people and the resulting effect on information that is described in the statement, and therefor it is not really comparable to "banks want to get robbed".
To observe that "information wants to be free" is akin to observing that "water wants to go downwards" whereas saying "banks want to get r
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If banks could just make infinite copies of every dollar, yes, that would be the same thing.
Of course my argument falls apart completely if you pay any attention to the shenanigans of the Federal reserve.
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the Internet has devalued content nearly to the point where the business reason to create it is disappearing
...or maybe we're just moving to an open content model (i.e., like FOSS). After all, information does want to be free.
OK, sure, information wants to be free. But guess what: free news comes with a price, and that price is reliability and dependability. Yes, we all know many news companies are biased, sometimes report on frivolous garbage, sometimes go all sensationalist, and *gasp* sometimes don't get it 100% correct. On the other hand, they also uncover many things for us (corruption on behalf of corporations, government, etc) and keep us in the loop when nobody else will, at least while being held to a higher standard. T
Re:devalued content (Score:4, Interesting)
Most likely what podunk news will become is this:
a: is the uncensored official record from the town clerk searchable and indexed well. All the official statements and speeches and everything on the record.
b: an official summary by the mayor, firechief, police chief, etc... or their appointed press people.
c: blogger / critics. The guy who lost for mayor but goes to all the town council meetings, along with good disucssion.
Now I ask you doesn't that sound a heck of a lot more informative than the podunk local newspaper.
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The real problem is that the actual content started disappearing much earlier. Even in 1960 the news was much less than it had been earlier. This is probably due to TV, but it's also due to increasing centralization of control. And the centralization of control has continued, until now there are probably only about 4 viewpoints commonly presented in the US. Perhaps 5.
1) Traditional conservative
2) Modern conservative
3) Traditional liberal
4) Modern liberal
5) Consipracies!! I've got conspiracies for you.
A
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Nope. I knew several people who ran BBSes back in those days, one of them being the largest BBS in Tennessee. The costs were quite high, much higher than modern web hosting. Even for a small hobby BBS, you had to have a second phone line dedicated to the BBS, so you had to pay for that yourself. If there were any software costs (for the BBS software), you had to pay for that as well. And of course, you had to dedicate a computer to the task, paying for it and the electricity.
For a large BBS, it was wor
Devalued? (Score:2)
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They're both pretentious dinosaurs who think that their name alone makes them more valuable, focusing more on their brand than their content.
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It would be different if their journalism was truly exceptional. But it's not so why pay for it?
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The problem is that someone is posting any AP story to the internet and national news used to be reposting that with a few edits for your local paper. Now, only the NYT, WSJ and a very few other general news sources actually write stories and go beyond what the AP does. I think NYT is doing a great thing and has the right product with which to do it.
/. ews Network (Score:2)
ISPs and content providers compete to be paid for the same thing, news at 11. In other news, people still refuse to learn how to code effectively.
content production reasons declining? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think blogs, and even facebook itself demonstrate very well that there will always be some content out there.
The major news sites just have to revamp, and stop being centers for advertising but centers for content and the people will come back. when a 5 page web article only has 2 pages of actual content you have a serious problem in your layout designs.
Besides paywalls are only good for only letting the people in who want to know your opinions. The rest of us know your opinions are just that and would prefer facts.
Re:content production reasons declining? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but what is it really worth to you for that, and how many places will you go to to pay on a recurring basis for the news? Just processing and dispute resolution can easily suck up $5-$10 a month on an account. How many of those sites are you going to pony up for? If a large scale micropayment system existed, it might work, but there are still a lot of content creators or managers who feel that the smallest discrete chunk of material is worth $1-$2. That is, of course, unsustainable if you want people to read it every day. In that case, maybe $10 a month sounds reasonable. But if you read news from half a dozen or more sources, you're looking at a very large monthly outlay.
On the flip side, it's been shown time and again that any population interested enough in a content pool to return on a regular basis for access also has a good demographic base for advertising. It will end up with advertising eventually, and you'll still be paying. And advertisers have the advantage of being a single source for collecting revenue. It's easy to charge them 1-10c/article, because you can guarantee you'll be getting them for 100,000 hits a month - much easier than tracking 100,000 individual accounts.
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The reasons for producing filler are declining. The profit motive has never been a driver of good journalism. Consider Democracy Now!, they do better journalism than any of the network news sources, and they give it away free.
Point about Twitter is foolish and shortsighted (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary here seems to focus on a minor (page 3) point in the article, but, man, what a bad point it is:
And the Times appears to be making a big mistake by letting people get unlimited access to its content if they come from Twitter and other feeds, apparently to not turn of the young-adult population. All that will do is perpetuate the free-loader culture and simply shift users to those conduits, turning them from grazers to firehose-feeders -- and undermining the whole notion of paying for frequent content usage.
Silly. This isn't a "big mistake". It's quite canny — they're paying people (with access to content) for providing word-of-mouth advertising. The cost (an article read for free) is very low and the benefit (lots of visitors come by without being annoyed) is high. It's a good move.
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I agree completely. Plus, if you are going to post more than a few links a month your going to need... to pay to get access.
Opposite take: Paywalls bad, NYT's is good (Score:5, Insightful)
Paywalls are bad because they hide information behind a wall where search engines and casual users cannot reach.
I think the NYT implementation is brilliant, because content will still be indexed by search engines, and users can get around the paywall in various ways so casual users need not really notice there is one much.
Where the NYT is falling down is pricing, they should provide a pricing point that lets people who want to support the paper but not be so high that it encourages skirting. The the NYT would have a pay hedge, where you could see beyond it but be happy to pay a small fee at the ornamental gate to enter if you wanted to spend more time inside.
NYT content not cached in search engines (Score:3)
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They did a good job job walling off their columnists when that was a for-pay section a few back.
That system worked for Google, but still kept casual users at bay. I know I read a lot fewer NYT articles at that point because I simply didn't want to bother to log in (I even had a login).
The new system works great for both Google and casual users. It's just a question of how the NYT convinces fans (and there are a lot of NYT fans) to give them money to get a bit more. The current pricing is insane because y
That part is bad (Score:2)
The price isn't the problem. It is the double charging for getting the same content on multiple devices.
Then he price is the problem because to use all your devices you have to pay a lot more than you should.
My take on it being brilliant is that it's the first paywall that will not hide the site and drive most users away.
Now making money is another matter altogether and there the NYT has no idea what they are doing. But it's all just a matter of adjusting pricing to a point where the people who want in wil
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I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Companies like Audible, Amazon and Barnes and Noble have figured this out, why not the Times. If I buy a Nook Book on my iPhone I can later get it for my Nook, my PC, or my Mac. Simple. Same with an audiobook from Audible or music from iTunes (in that case obviously I'm just moving the file around). Paying for stuff doesn't bother me. Honestly, while I'd prefer not to have it, DRM doesn't even bother me much as long as it isn't intrusive and allows me to a
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.
Confusing Exceptions (Score:4, Insightful)
Post an article's link to your Twitter account? No paywall.
Post it to your Facebook page? Paywall!
Post it on your blog? No paywall!
Send it in an email? Who knows!
The rules are confusing. People operate on the assumption that if a link works for them, they can share it with everyone. This is going to result in a lot of frustration.
Right Price (Score:4, Interesting)
Troll summary (Score:2)
No the NYT is being shat upon because they are charging more for their wares than people that serve up video and audio. It's $36/year to subscribe to Pandora. NYT wants $35 for a month's worth of access. And you think WE are the insane ones? Get a grip.
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Except they want $15/month for access.
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Even at $15 a month, wouldn't that be too much considering the price of delivery is so low? My real point was the cost is not within reason. I predict it will fail and they will lower it.
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That would be a more valid comparison if Pandora did something other than stream content other people generated, and pay licensing fees to those people for streaming it. I can guarantee you that if Pandora actually had to find, record, produce and market the bands you're listening to through their service, the subscription fee would be a hell of a lot more than $3 / month.
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Well let's use HBO then. It's $45-50/month to create entire TV shows that cost millions to make. Compare that to the $35/month for NYT all acess and you start to see a disparity in value. Big time.
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Ah, I see - you think that an hour or two worth of original reporting produced & delivered daily, produced by actually hiring and sending journalists all over the world to the places where the stories are happening is MUCH cheaper than a 1-hour-a-week television show, filmed in a single location, usually with a cast and crew numbering in the dozens?
I'm not certain your comparison underscores the point you seem to think it does. Running a news organization requires quite a few salaries, and a lot of tra
Print media vs Video Media (Score:2)
THIS IS A HUGE DIFFERENCE See how annoying someone shoutin
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They could even offer a double route - ads if you don't pay, no ads if you do pay.
If only there existed a tech blog that did that. I even have a great name for this theoretical site... We could call it... Slashdot!
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TNT/USA/NBC/ and most of the internet all use an advertiser supported model. Their adds are annoying, but the content is free.
TNT, USA, and the other cable networks aren't free. The cable/satellite provider pays the network for the channel, and that charge is rolled into the charge that customers pay for the packages that include that channel. It's not as obvious as the premium movie networks like HBO, Showtime, Starz, etc., since you don't have the option of individually subscribing to that channel.
You also missed a third business model. The PBS model of free to everybody content, funded significantly by viewers opting to pay for
How much is it worth? (Score:4, Interesting)
What I can't understand is if the mobile version and web version still have ads, and the printing costs are eliminated, and distribution costs are all but eliminated, why they need to choose the $180 price point a year instead of the $99 price point. I can see $200 on the iPad, with more limited ads.
It is the nature of an enterprise to try to maximize profit. The NYT, and The Daily, and WSJ, all are trying to maximize the value of a product. However, I can see publications like HufPo, using the overestimation of value of the other rags as an opportunity to put them out of business. I have no ill will for the NYT, I have subscribed to the digital editions when they were more reasonably priced. I think they will find few customers at this price point.
I was offered a free 2011 subscription (Score:2)
At 50 cents per day, the subscription price was higher than I wanted, but not onerous. Its 1/4 the print price. I was going to procrastinate signing up hoping for some discount.
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I got an offer on March 17, a few hours after the Important Announcement(TM), and already "decided" there. No increase in ads (just had to confirm I wanted it by re-entering my password at nytimes), but then I block Flash except from those few sites (gaming etc.) or pages that I want to use it on so I just get GIFs and JPEGs and I guess whatever cookies they feel like adding.
So not much changed since then, other than I have a free subscription to the Web and app versions until Dec. 31 and maybe Lincoln kno
Can't pay for every newspaper (Score:2)
Paywalls may become defacto, but it will take time (Score:2)
IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet. IF enough news organizations fail, then there will be a demand for GOOD journalism. When the demand is there, the money will be there, and paywalls will make good sense.
BUT not now. Right now we've got every broadcast and cable news outlet flooding the Internet with news content. Some of it is even decent coverage. So as long as there is a decent option for free news, then paywalls are irrelevant.
Tha
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IF news outlets can't make money, then eventually there is no need to be a news outlet.
That may be true, unless you accept the possibility that mainstream news is little more than pure corporatist propaganda that has value to its owners that extends beyond the operating profits of the media outlet (i.e., the power to influence opinion is more valuable to the media owners than the outlet's operating profit). In that case, the real question is: does the loss of operating revenue in the Internet age make media outlets have to rely on 'selling influence' as their sole source of value?
If there
Paywalls need to be convenient to work (Score:2)
Trying to get payment is hampered not so much by people's unwillingness to pay... but by the inconvenience of paying.
1. I don't want to sign up for every single site. This is what really hampers most paywalls. The internet gives you loads of content from lots of sources. Links are being sent all the time. So you need a way to give payments without requiring people to sign up for every single site.
2. Micro-payments seemed like an interesting solution... except once again... there is no standard and of
Maybe data costs more per kB than I thought, but (Score:2)
Bah humbug. The actual content on most sites isn't all that large. Strip out the flash ads, images unrelated to the article, gratuitous javascript, etc., and you're left with the very small amount that actually matters.
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Devalued useless content (Score:2)
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.
Err, you mean devalued USELESS content. Note how "we" call it "content" instead of information or news, because information and news are valuable. "content" on the other hand is a placeholder to cover up some empty space.
Lets summarize the "valuable" content I see when I pull up the times front page right now:
Radiation is bad for your kids. no kidding? I never knew. Thank $diety the times is here so I can learn that. I was going to feed my kids enriched U-235 tonight, but now I'm "scared straight".
An ol
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Oh yes, that nerve. (Score:2)
The nerve of these massive media companies controlling almost all aspects of our knowledge of events around us and internationally. How the quality has sunk as share prices have risen, the unrelenting drive towards profit damaging concepts like professional integrity, validating the facts, and presenting the facts in a neutral fashion.Why, for all these things they've done we should pay them more.
Er, no. The reason blogs have become so damn popular and competition for conventional media outlets is because t
Two reasons (Score:3)
1. NYT's paywall is a stupid hack that your dog could code around.
2. Back when newspapers were necessary, users could afford to have one, maybe two newspapers delivered, unless money was no object (and those for whom money is no object are on the other side of the economy and don't matter to this side). So they got one and they read that one religiously. And it mattered which one they chose. For a marginal amount, you could get one that was better than all of the others. You could get the news you needed for the money you had, and you weren't living with second-best. So it was a deal. Now that everyone has free access to tens of thousands of news sources, nobody needs a paper. Everyone gets more news than they need, for free. So asking people to pay for it is like asking them to pay for bottled air. Sure you'll find a few suckers, and connoisseurs, and emphysema victims or others who are dependent on your exact product, but the rest will think you're just plain nuts.
And at this point, even if ever professional news organization on the planet went to a paywall system, people would crowd-source their information, and the only way to keep the crowd from supplying it is for the news organizations to pay significantly for information from principal sources in the crowd. But we're a ways off from that sort of global social whoredom.
Paywall Fails for NoScript Users (Score:2)
As Mike from techdirt points out:
Am I Violating The DMCA By Visiting The NYTimes With NoScript Enabled? [techdirt.com]
Buggy NYT iPad App (Score:2)
Read all the reviews on the AppStore about how buggy the NYT iPad app is. It would be fraudulent to put the NYT behind a paywall with an app that crashes all the time. In addition, you are already "paying" for the service by virtue of all the terribly intrusive advertising you have to undure (I had an audio file just start playing on its own while I was reading an article one day...that was the straw that broke the camel's back and I uninstalled the app). Customer service was useless, editor, ombudsman and
Hey Rupert, what about your advertisers? (Score:2)
Perhaps they should have adopted an "App" model. I think it may have cost significantly less to let coders build some NYT clients/readers for various platforms.
As to the internet devaluing content, that is the last dying grasp at a straw for industries that have failed to evolve with the rest of us. These are the same industries who alienate their customers by suing them for making backup co
Has it? (Score:2)
And you expect quality news to disappear? Really? There's more valuable content than ever right now, in spite of the fact that we've been hearing the same sob story for a decade now about how there's not enough money to be made from internet advertising.
Paywalls are not good (Score:2)
People don't want to pay for what they consider they have already payed for, to the ISP. What would work is some kind of micro-payment system where the ISP adds the cost of access onto your bill and channeled payment upstream to the content provider.
Nothing good about paywalls (Score:2)
You don't seem to get it... (Score:2)
You make two fundamental flaws; equating web content to physical goods and assuming that a system designed for academic information sharing (that originally banned all commercial activity) is well suited as a business/retail platform.
Physical news papers have a significant cost to print and distribute, per user. One more viewer on a web site has a near-zero cost.
Many print magazines are virtually free as subscriptions often just cover the cost of distribution. Advertising pays for the production and prin
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My perception of both organizations is that they occasionally do an interesting piece but are more than willing to bury a news stories like: CIA black sites, warrantless wiretapping of US citizens, etc. and their editorial boards seem to take their lead from whoever is in Washington regardless of party. Although they can both be lazy to when it comes to fact checking the err
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Personally, my attitude is that I favor those
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Fox News has segments where they stick pundits together from different parties and let them dog fight, then people who don't like Fox News go "no the Conservative always wins" when they're both making ridiculous asses of themselves. (In other words, they consistently argue that the conservative has better arguments and the liberal is a retard, and thus Fox News is run by conservatives with a strong bias, and conservatives are retards so it's misinformation ... see the logical disconnect between one point a
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Find another reason to produce content. What's the cost/benefit ratio of societal ignorance and tedium? What is more profitable? An intelligent, lively, healthy public, or an ignorant, dull, diseased one?
The problem is your assumption that the current "big content producers" somehow, miraculously I guess, produce "intelligent lively healthy public".
All they do is scare people, distribute corporate and statist propaganda, and try to control people into buying stuff they don't want. Very little to nothing redeemable. Oh, occasionally they'll try to "preach to the choir" about something ridiculously simple so folks whom already know the gospel feel morally superior, but a population that feels morally superi
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wait wait wait.. Mr. Infoworld, but.. uh.. if:
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
then why did you write your article and spam it on /.? If not for income then it must just be an ego thing, right?
Maybe it was astroturfing?