The New Yorker Alters Its Online Strategy

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/business/media/the-new-yorker-alters-its-online-strategy.html

by Doubleguitars • 12 years ago

32 29 12 years ago

chuckcode• 12 years ago

I really hope they improve the app as well. Great articles in print but app was almost unusable last year when I tried to do a digital only subscription.

hackuser3• 12 years ago

Isn't the real problem a lack of good micro-payment systems? I think the vast majority of readers would be happy to pay 10 cents or 50 cents for an article, if it didn't take $20 of their time to do it (e.g., create account, login, enter credit card, etc.). Look at how many people happily paid for downloading music once it was made easy enough (i.e., via iTunes).

What ever happened to micro-payments, which once were the next big thing?

msellout• 12 years ago

It turned out that subscriptions generate more revenue than micro-payments.

kevinwang• 12 years ago

but maybe this is only because there isn't an existing, good micro-payment system.

tempestn• 12 years ago

Even better from a user's perspective (although undoubtedly untenable revenue-wise) would be micro-payments after reading the article. I'd much rather pay for something after I have a chance to determine its value.

Perhaps showing a preview then a paywall to read the rest would work, but the vast majority of those I've seen use far too short a preview to really tell whether the article is worth reading.

prawn4• 12 years ago

I always wondered if micropayments couldn't operate on a retroactive/guilt basis. e.g., you read articles as you would without a paywall and a cookie tracks your totals. At a certain point and every now and then thereafter, the site would tell you how many articles you've enjoyed freely, remind you of the professionals creating those articles and ask you to contribute based on your usage. Pay what you want, but suggest a typical value, etc.

Never got around to building a solution for it, but figured a startup could tackle this pretty easily with some code that clients could copy and paste to get started.

walterbell• 12 years ago

Flattr has been doing this for a few years. One of their best innovations was allowing people to "tip" publishers by simply favoriting a tweet:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130416/01322422720/unfor...

Sadly, Twitter in their infinite desire to shoot their platform in the foot, put an end to Twitter micropayments. Flattr even offered to forego all fees, although revshare would have made more sense. Facebook could also do something in this area, by linking Like to payments, though that may conflict with their use of non-deterministic timelines as a penalty for non-advertisers.

Instead of gating demand (with ad-throttling of publishers), what would happen if social media taxed publishing value with optional micropayments via likes/favorites?

Twitter went to a lot of trouble to terminate third-party clients so they could control user interface monetization, e.g. inject ads & video. But what have they done with that control? Executive musical chairs have already started at Twitter. It's not too late to reverse strategic mistakes and re-open the Twitter platform to 3rd-party innovation.

tinypass• 12 years ago

Tinypass does exactly this with its "Counter" feature that displays to readers how many free previews they have left in the metered paywall. Then, when the meter expires, the content is blocked or a donation is requested. Hundreds of publishers are using the platform. http://tinypass.com

aleem2• 12 years ago

Micropayments suffers from a number of issues. If my monthly spend it $1 across 20 articles at 5 cents each then a single customer support query is likely to eat up months worth of margins for my account. Refunds are going to be just as hard. Operational costs are also generally quite high for processing payments across thousands of vendors across the Internet which requires not transaction processing, auditing, logging and so forth.

There are also practical issues such as building a common processing platform that can be used the same currency across competitors (Microsoft, NYTimes, Google News, etc), currency exchange rates, and so forth.

That said, if there were a pay-per-use model, I would happily use it without thinking twice about spending 5 cents on an article.

jzwinck• 12 years ago

5 cents per article is not realistic. The rate for a basic New York Times subscription is $3.75 per week. At 5 cents per article, their average user would have to elect to pay for 75 articles per week. I don't have access to the data to know for sure, but let's guess an average user reads 3 articles per week. They'd need to pay $1.25 for each...which is probably high enough to convince them not to read some content, which is counter-productive. So it may be better business to avoid per-article purchasing, if it further reduces readership which is very undesirable.

pgsandstrom• 12 years ago

The problem with micro-payments is that the customer is always reminded that they are paying for the service. The subscription-model will always be superior in this way.

gabemart• 12 years ago

I've always thought the biggest problem with micropayments is the mental cost of deciding whether or not to purchase something. Decisions are painful, and deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 online isn't much less painful that deciding to spend $2.00 or $20.00 online. The pain of deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 far, far outweighs the value of the $0.20 to me. This suggests micropayments are an inefficient payment system.

Being asked whether or not I want to spend $0.25 or $0.50 twenty or fifty times a day is not an appealing prospect.

In short, don't make me think.

aragot• 12 years ago

The compound problem with micropayments is, they'd still make you go through the loop of sign up-receive the newsletter-download the app, which would offset the advantage of the micropayment and corroborates your "Dont make me think" motto.

mcherm2• 12 years ago

There is a solution to that problem -- pay AFTER reading the article. Now you don't have to predict the article's value; you know what it was.

This solution comes with its own problem: after reading, there is absolutely no incentive to pay other than good will. And most won't pay.

hackuser3• 12 years ago

The pain of deciding whether or not to spend $0.20 far, far outweighs the value of the $0.20 to me.

Different strokes ... I don't think much at all about paying 20 cents; just minimize the disruption to my train of thought with a simple button and a responsive interface.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

Nobody likes nickel and dime stuff. I'm not paying a quarter to read a single article when I could subscribe to a whole year of the New Yorker for $15.

menubar• 12 years ago

What ever happened to advertising as a form of revenue?

In print publishing, all newspaper/magazine articles are typically space filler to direct your attention path to the accompanying ads.

With a decent sales staff and correct ad pricing there should be no reason to charge users to read an article online. Sure, printing costs are high, but repurposing content for online publication is cheaper by an order of magnitudes.

I've been in (newspaper/magazine) publishing over 30 years. I surfed through the waves of insanity when the internet started to become ubiquitous and publishers were pulling their hair out over fears that it would be the death of them. It's nothing more than an excuse for greed. It could have been handled properly by establishing ad revenue pricing structures early on, but it was easier for them to cry, complain and voluntarily remain ignorant of new tech while the owners of the publications bemoaned that their paper publication is not making enough money to stay afloat and keep their trophy wives in sport cars and designer jewelry at the same time.

I have no pity on these ignorant fools. If the New York Times goes bankrupt/offline it won't affect my life one bit. Other, more fiscally responsible individuals/organizations/bloggers will fill the niche and do it right.

eevilspock3• 12 years ago

First, are you actually saying charging people for something they consume directly instead of charging them indirectly through advertising[1] is greed? Does that mean my corner grocer is greedy for asking me to pay for my milk rather than slapping ads all over the carton?

Second, I'm amazed that you decry greed and in the same breadth promote advertising. I don't know whether to cry or laugh. Advertising is predominantly (some would say almost entirely) manipulative and dishonest.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773

The New Yorker Alters Its Online Strategy

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