Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’
NY Times’ “metered” online subscription plan raises a lot of questions
Starting in 2011, the New York Times will begin to charge for access to stories on its web site. 
However, this paywall is not like others we have seen in that it won’t start charging users until they click through several stories. Needless to say, this plan has raised more than a few eyebrows.
Their plan is to count how many times a user reads their articles and start charging them once they exceed a certain threshold (the threshold has yet to be determined). Sounds a bit counter intuitive doesn’t it? Why punish your most loyal readers? The reason for this is to stay relevant with search engines. Closing everything off from the massive crowd of freeloaders (err … i mean users) would alienate the casual web surfer as well as piss off search engines. They assume that their most diehard loyal fans will not mind paying for their content. That theory will be put to the test quickly.
This raises a lot of questions. How many articles do you let users read before you pull the plug? What type of technology will they use to enforce this? Even inexperienced users know how to clear their cookies these days. So how do you identify unique users with a good accuracy rate? Using IP addresses? Those can easily be manipulated. Maybe there will be some kind of free registration before you hit the paywall (seems like that would defeat the purpose of a “metered” plan). There just seems to be so many ways around this plan. Hordes of people will put articles on message boards, web sites, and in the comment sections of free blogs, while the NY Times legal department tries to hunt them down with copyright suites. The NY Times wants the best of both worlds where they can have a paywall, but still give away a lot for free. That is a very tricky balance to strike.
Another big question is whether or not the Times can make enough money through online subscriptions to offset potentially massive losses in online advertising revenue. It’s hard to imagine the Times traffic not taking a big dip once they put in a paywall. They simply won’t have the same volume of people viewing their articles, which will make them less attractive to advertisers. On the other hand, some advertisers may like the fact that they have a core set of loyal users and will have a very solid handle on their demographics (I assume the paywall registration process will ask people a lot of questions about age, income etc.).
The one thing that is for certain is that many eyes will be on this project to see if this plan can save the struggling newspaper industry. Only time will tell.