NYTimes to start charging for access to their website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.html

by js3309 • 17 years ago

63 64 17 years ago

ilamont• 17 years ago

It's really quite surprising that it's taken this long to reach the decision, and it will take another year before people start paying anything.

No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.

wallflower• 17 years ago

> No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.

I assume it will sadly turn into the WSJ app (few free articles, majority subscriber-only).

Of course, I can see Steve Jobs and Apple working a deal with the NYTimes to bundle a free 1-yr subscription for their iSlate owners.

_cbsz• 17 years ago

Speaking of the iPhone/iTouch app, I would love to see a caching HN app. I read NYT on my iPod Touch (without wireless) most days when I walk to/from work, but I would switch to a substitute news source rather than pay.

pierrefar3• 17 years ago

>>"There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.

Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP-based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.

So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?

Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?

tudorachim• 17 years ago

Although you may be able to bypass their protection, even if it's a simple cookie authentication, the whole operation will probably not be a failure. Presumably most people they are targeting, who might be willing to pay for a subscription, aren't tech-savvy enough and lack the motivation to get around it.

smokinn2• 17 years ago

Are you somehow implying that a pay-wall can't be built? Porn sites seem to have figured it out quite a while ago so I don't see how NYTimes would be any different.

Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to a friend but that generally isn't a problem.

Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid for it anyway.

pierrefar3• 17 years ago

I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism they think of can probably be circumvented easily.

bediger• 17 years ago

Wait, wait! Are you trying to tell us that NYTimes' content is as valuable as porn?

I beg to differ, Sirrah!

Also, if you, ah, investigate online porn, you'll find that the on-line porn sites seem to have a gentleman's agreement to not get all huffy if the occasional, incomplete picture set leaks to a free site.

jonknee• 17 years ago

Do it with sign ins and require you to validate the account with a phone number (a la Craigslist). That has been incredibly effective at CL.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

Why not just do it with IP address? Too annoying for most people to spoof. The few who have shared IP addresses get screwed, not really a big deal.

Nekojoe• 17 years ago

"Starting in early 2011..." that's an age away in internet time. Things could have changed considerably by then.

ramchip3• 17 years ago

It's just one year...the Internet in early 2009 wasn't all that much different from now. I frequent the same websites I did back then, personally.

hexis• 17 years ago

As an example of a large change in 2009, Facebook went from 150 million active users to 350 million active users ( http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline ). I consider that a fairly large change in the consumer web.

kattervon• 17 years ago

It's an entire year to look like they're doing something

e40• 17 years ago

The NYT used to have a pay model. I paid them something like $8/mo. I didn't really use what I got over the free side of the site, but I wanted to support their journalism. After a few months I got an email that they would no longer be billing me.

billybob• 17 years ago

In other news, "billybob to stop reading nytimes.com"

robg8• 17 years ago

I had the same initial response where robg == billybob. Then I started thinking "why must good content be free?". The best alternatives (Economist, WSJ) all charge and I'm not about to start reading cnn.com. Perhaps the BBC site.

I could cobble together a morning read from other sources. I guess it just depends on their pricing model. I'm willing to listen, at least.

roc4• 17 years ago

Good daily news must be free, because the facts are free and there are too many places that will freely distribute those facts.

Good content, on the other hand, does not have to be daily news. Which is the distinction I wish more newspaper companies would understand. You'll never get people to pay for box scores or reprints from the AP/Reuters. You will get people to pay for investigative journalism, quality insight, in depth reporting, etc.

The Times would have a better chance at monetizing if they stuck to such a 'members' section concept. Another under-appreciated fact overlooked in most monetization schemes: people will pay for the ability to comment and be given preferential comment placement. And when only subscribers can comment, it's far easier to police for spam and moderate for civility.

symesc• 17 years ago

No kidding. I dropped WSJ.com last year and don't miss it.

The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.

Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000 versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."

I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of someone trying to save his job.

robg8• 17 years ago

Aren't most of those other sites derivative though? They opine on the news reported by others (or just copy/paste), and often poorly without relevant context. Moreover, I kinda like one-stop shopping for World, National, Business, and Technology news. It's not perfect, given journalistic biases, but it's often good enough.

I may be biased though. I grew up delivering and reading the newspaper.

jsm386• 17 years ago

"But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand."

Given the widely accepted disaster that was TimesSelect, this doesn't seem to be off to a promising start. How do you make such a monumental decision about your business, announce it publically, and say, yeah, we'll figure out how this will work soon, get back to us in a few months.

And it's not just business strategy. As pierrefar notes in another thread, they haven't figured out how they're going to achieve this anyway...

Will they deindex from Google? Wi

gr366• 17 years ago

I don't suppose this means that subscribers will get a version without banner ads. In the same way that newspapers have historically sold their print version for less than it cost to publish and made their money off print ads and classifieds, I imagine we'll get much the same experience but be paying for it. NYT doesn't want to trade ad revenue for subscriber revenue. They want to augment it.

BUUUUUT, since the internet is a dynamic medium, maybe they could offer a tiered pricing scheme (like every other for-pay web app these days) that includes a no ads option. It should be easy enough: just display the print version of the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...

mark_l_watson• 17 years ago

The free service right now (having a 'mini newspaper' emailed to you every morning) is nice, but to be honest, I would value this at about $1/month, but I might pay up to $1.50/month to support journalism. I suspect that they will want to charge more than this.

robg8• 17 years ago

You're basically willing to trade one cup of coffee for a month of decent journalism, but no more?

markpercival• 17 years ago

And at $1.50 it's not going to be a particularly good cup of coffee.

But I'm in the same boat. I already shell out ~$100 a year for the Economist, and various other subscriptions. If I have to start paying for all the news SOURCES I read I'm going to be out a great deal more. Note I said SOURCES. I'm willing to pay for news, but not a monthly subscription to a news site I only read occasionally.

rarrrrrr• 17 years ago

Great -- I'd like to support their journalism efforts and I'm not interested in home delivery.

notirk• 17 years ago

I'm interested to see if paid subscribers have ads alongside their articles. I would consider paying it to contribute to good journalism AND have fewer ads (I am aware of AdBlock, however, I am also aware of how the Internet economy current works.)

vermontdevil• 17 years ago

See cable as an example.

Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO etc).

So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending on the audience.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model doesn't work.

I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.

KWD• 17 years ago

I honestly don't think the metered approach will work for them. Most people will hit that point, and instead of paying will search for, and find, they have other alternatives. In the end, NY Times will just lose most of those regulars as the alternative becomes the primary source.

moron4hire• 17 years ago

<sarcasm>I didn't realize anyone still read traditional news outlets.</sarcasm>

Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.

This is the death-knell of the traditional news media. When they start actively driving consumers away by charging for services once rendered free, there is no way they will be able to recover. The Internet has enabled citizen journalists to get inside the established media's OODA loop and take them out. Established media is too slow and too antiquated to ever be able to catch up, let alone get ahead and stay ahead.

smiler• 17 years ago

Can you point me to some good citizen journalism then?

Padraig• 17 years ago

http://talkingpointsmemo.com http://fivethirtyeight.com

imok20• 17 years ago

I've been hoping for this for over a year now. I'm _more_ than happy to support their journalists oversea and at home (USA for me, as for the NYT). Without some sort of support, we wouldn't be getting the same breadth and depth and quality of news.

It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.

This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.

jedc• 17 years ago

Me, too, but I hope they get their price-point right.

Paying $50 for TimesSelect to read the OpEd writers and a few other articles was way too much for me.

I'm an American living in Europe, and the NYTimes is the best place for me to get my American news "fix". The core reporting is what I really value and am happy to pay for.

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

It was too much for the OpEd writers, too; they don't like being locked inside a paywall any more than the rest of us like being locked outside of one.

wvenable• 17 years ago

I don't disagree with your statements but that doesn't mean I'll be paying and here is why: I read articles from probably 15 different sites every day (and not same 15 from day to day). I simply can't afford to pay a subscription to every one of those sites nor do I want pay for just one site and get my news from a single source.

The problem is that this the same dead-tree business model moved to the web. It might appeal to people who consume their information in the classical morning newspaper way but I suspect that is a dwindling market.

CamperBob2• 17 years ago

It seemed obvious to me in 1994 that Web content syndication was eventually going to be the answer to your question ("How can I afford to subscribe to 15 different providers?")

People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around 2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen, and eventually will.

It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal. If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.

kmod• 17 years ago

I don't understand how you make the jump from "I want to support this company" to "everyone should be forced to support this company". If you want to support them, there are ways you can do it currently, so if you really want to support them than you would have done it already. Are you saying that you want them to be supported, but you want other people to shoulder the cost?

I think charging or not for their services is definitely the NYTimes's prerogative. That doesn't mean that it's a good choice. Personally, I think it's a bad choice, because they're going to alienate some of their most loyal readers. I, too, wish that the neswpapers could find a sustainable way to remain profitable, but I don't think this is it. But if there is no sustainable way, I guess that means that newspapers actually aren't as valuable to us as we like to think, because otherwise we'd be willing to pay for it.

blhack• 17 years ago

everyone should be forced to support this company

They're not trying to force anybody to support them. They're changing their business model in order to allow their customers to support them.

Nobody is forcing you to read NYT, if you don't want to pay, don't read it.

(I probably won't be paying, and I disagree with this, but it is their company to do with what they please)

RiderOfGiraffes• 17 years ago

Largely the same discussion happened on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507

Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought I'd make the connection since I noticed it.

Also reported here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009

A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.

discolemonade• 17 years ago

The problem with charging for news is that news as it's presented is unspectacular. Most people, if they don't have to-- won't pay for unspectacular information because chances are they can get it somewhere else because it isn't hard to produce or duplicate. I can get the same information from the NY Times at the Washpost. I do like their opeds though. I read David Brooks a lot. But I still won't pay for David Brooks' insight because it doesn't make me money or save me time or do something to make my life easier. That's the only kind of information you can form a business model around.

DanielStraight• 17 years ago

To me, there are order of magnitude differences between good news sites and regular news sites. NYTimes is, in my mind, the best of the best, so I would have no problem with paying. Actually, I'm glad to see them respect their own content enough to charge for it. The advice to consultants is always to not undervalue their time, yet the advice to big companies always seems to be to undervalue their products.

Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.

siculars• 17 years ago

How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la GoogleShare (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495)? If they allow a certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies periodically.

To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.

ibsulon• 17 years ago

The NYT's target demographic is the top 40% of income producers middle age and older. They don't know how to reach us, and they're not worried about it for another few years. If they lose us (in a general sense here), they're not too worried yet. At that point, they'll start hiring people like Kos and other top bloggers on both sides of the isle as their columnists and target us.

Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print is not targeted at us.

redwax2• 17 years ago

Keeping the poor uninformed is important for modern democracy.

redwax2• 17 years ago

Can anyone explain the downvotes ? Surely my point is valid even if couched in the sarcasm of devils advocacy - are sarcasm tags needed ?

A democracy cannot function without an informed public. The press has traditionally been seen as the main guarantor of keeping people informed. Creating a paywall is exclusiory to the less well off. This therefore makes the United States less democratic.

Can I please be argued with rather than downvoted or is there no such thing as netiquette these days ?

mattparcher• 17 years ago

I agree with John Gruber, who cited this tweet from Dave Winer (developer, entrepreneur, writer, and a pioneer of RSS and podcasting):

"My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they'd just do it."

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921

NYTimes to start charging for access to their website.

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