NYTimes: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/opinion/l18times.html

by rmah • 15 years ago

30 29 15 years ago

muhfuhkuh• 15 years ago

Seems fair to me. Eventually, freeloaders (myself included) will be relegated to reading al-Jazeera, BBC News, NPR, and some random combination of AP/Reuters/UPI via Google News.

Or, you know, some of us may pay.

gaius3• 15 years ago

BBC is paid for by the British taxpayer. Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari royal family. Reuters news is a loss-leader for their financial services business.

News is expensive! Don't be fooled that because commentary on news that others have gathered (e.g. HuffPo) is essentially free that it doesn't cost real money to send a reporter to some faraway place for 6 months to do some investigative journalism, then fact-check it and write it up...

CallMeV• 15 years ago

One tiny modifier to your comment.

The BBC is paid for by the British television license payer, not the taxpayer. Otherwise, spot on. Journalists need to eat, too.

stuartjmoore• 15 years ago

Their pricing seems too straightforward. $15 for .com and smartphone. $20 for .com and tablet. $35 for .com, smartphone, and tablet. 35 = 15 + 20...

.com, smartphone, and tablet should be less than the first two combined. Incentivise people to pay more by making it seem like less.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

Interesting how the prices (from http://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp0145.htm... rated at "every four weeks" rather than "per month". A chance to squeeze out one extra payment per year?

nanoanderson2• 15 years ago

They just seem to be following their print model for some sort of mental connection in buyers used to paying for weekly newspaper subscriptions. It's confusing to me to figure out as someone who prefers monthly installments (UK rent is figured per week as well, then multiplied by 52, then divided by 12 for the monthly rent… so convoluted), but it's not totally bizarre for NYTimes to bill this way.

Helianthus16• 15 years ago

alternatively, a way to accurately measure their accounting week by week?

nanoanderson2• 15 years ago

I can't find any mention of whether advertisements will be shown to paying customers. The "no-pay-but-view-ads" vs. "pay-with-no-ads" model has been a mainstay of most freemium websites, but NYTimes looks like it's going to keep ads no matter if you pay or not.

At $3.75 to $8.75 per week, I'd expect ads to be gone. Not that they need to be. It's just what I've come to expect.

The news publication industry is changing (along with the rest of the publication industry). I like the direction NYTimes is going in -- "For quality content, you should expect to pay real money" -- but the model has so much bad baggage attached to it that it seems doomed to failure, with The Times (London) being the most recent NYTimes-scale example.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

Nice. For only $15 dollars a month I can get the latest updates on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the virtues of warrantless wiretapping. What a bargain.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

Thank you.

It isn't free news that killed the newspapers.

It is their own so called news, which are mostly put there by pr companies or else are outright lies by politicians.

Alex39172• 15 years ago

To be fair though, the reason mainstream newspapers are mostly propaganda and advertising is because they are free.

cschmidt• 15 years ago

If you have any home delivery, then you get all the digital stuff for free. Here's how the prices compare for delivery in my zipcode (Boston):

Daily Delivery (7 Days), $29.60 per four weeks

The Weekender (Friday–Sunday), $20.80 per four weeks

Sunday Only, $15 per four weeks

Weekday (Monday–Friday), $14.80 per four weeks

All Digital Access, $35 every four weeks

NYtimes.com + Tablet App, $20 every four weeks

NYtimes.com + Smartphone App, $15 every four weeks

So getting a weekday subscription at $14.80 gets you the $35 digital deal. I'm sure they won't mind if this drives some extra dead tree subscriptions.

natch• 15 years ago

Wow, the pricing seems incredibly steep. I'm used to thinking twice before subscribing to magazines, since $12/year per magazine adds up. But they are talking about $8+ a week - wow. Good luck getting enough people to pay that. And before someone starts talking about lattes, I don't buy lattes, for the same reason. And I have a really good income.

jellicle2• 15 years ago

For comparison, a major national newspaper delivered to my door was just offered for $1.50/week - six issues per week.

So: dead trees delivered to my door, six times per week: $1.50/week.

Bits which I have to go fetch myself, paying rather usurious bandwidth rates: $8.75/week.

Hmmmm. Something seems off here.

dexen• 15 years ago

The major source of revenue for press is ads. The difference in pricing may be reflection of lower income from online ads, itself result of lower impact of those.

drallison• 15 years ago

Here is the letter sent to current digital subscribers. http://www.stanford.edu/~allison/nytimespaywall.html

joebadmo• 15 years ago

I find it strange that no one seems to be talking about what his does to NYT's google-juice/clout in the link economy. NYT peddles influence by being widely read/the paper of record, but doesn't putting up a paywall directly mitigate that? Ad-supported model seems to (for the most part) complement that; a paywall opposes it.

jellicle2• 15 years ago

Really depends on Google's policies. I'm imagine that Google was consulted and gave their approval for this setup. Perhaps people coming from a Google link will be automatically allowed entry, in the same way as the expert-sexchange site works.

gaius3• 15 years ago

This only affects people who read more than 20 articles/month. So the content is actually all still there and linkable to the open web.

pointillistic• 15 years ago

Although I think this long overdue, and I support the move in this direction, NYT is makings a big mistake by charging too much. The price should be $5.95 per month (perhaps a discount for seniors and students).

The problem is that they can't charge that little compared to the paper delivery. Indeed, they must cut the paper cord and think digitally, small fee will multiply exponentially, worldwide.

nicksergeant• 15 years ago

The real issue here is the the Times is just trying to find a way to pay for their nice big NYC downtown tower. That and other typical newspaper-related overhead, which used to be well within their operating budget, before the internet.

The newspaper industry is the dying industry of our time, and desperation set in a while ago. The NYT took a bit longer to appear desperate because of it's generally more loyal readerbase and large coffers, while most small dailies & weeklies have either drastically reduced overhead or completely packed up already.

drewda2• 15 years ago

The Times already cashed out of much of their stake in the headquarters building: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123660214438270341.html

And many newspapers still turn a reasonable profit, it's just that the major metros can't earn enough to pay off all the debts left over from the major consolidations at the start of the decade. One reference to that effect: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/consolidation-is-n...

thushan• 15 years ago

The Times announced digital subscriptions today. Good move. The pricing - backwards as all hell.

NYTimes.com + Smartphone = $15/month NYTimes.com + Tablet = $20/month NYTimes.com + Tablet + Smartphone = $35/month (WHAT?)

First, how does one differentiate the value add between a smart phone and a tablet enough to charge the sum of those parts, not an incremental addition?

Two, if you go with the cheapest print option (weekday) at $14.80 a month delivered to your house, you get all access across all devices. As one of my friends noted: how could they not look around and be inspired by digital companies that have millions of users on a few dollars a month on drip....but no. They still think of themselves as a print provider. Name another service we pay $15 bucks a month to access from our smartphone.

This seems like a print centric decision.

neild• 15 years ago

$14.80/month for the weekday-only print subscription is a 50% off deal that lasts only three months. You'll be paying ~$30/month after that.

Which is, of course, still cheaper than the web+smartphone+tablet plan.

joebananas• 15 years ago

So, can Firefox extensions fiddle with referrer info? I think I just got an idea for a new one.

alexqgb• 15 years ago

Wondering what this means for the constellation of links to old NYT pieces now embedded in blogs around the world.

Assuming that following one would count against the 20 free articles per month quota they've established, and that they're not planning an apocalyptic sweep of millions of inbound links.

RandyHelzerman• 15 years ago

I hope this works; if it does, it will be the best thing which has happened to news in a long time. Companies produce product which is beneficial to their customers; if those customers are large corporations buying advertisement, their product will be beneficial to large corporations. If their customers are you and me, spending $8 a week for news, they will produce product beneficial to us.

drewda2• 15 years ago

The most interesting sentence is: "For some search engines, users will have a daily limit of free links to Times articles." The question being which search engines is The Times cutting deals with...

NYTimes: A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions

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