Not surprisingly, I was not alone in having a reaction to the New York Times paywall details, which were announced Thursday.
Lois Beckett of the Nieman Lab asked what I thought, so I told her (as did several others). Steven Brill says not to call it a wall. David Cohn says it’s more like a ramp (great Star Wars metaphor; I’m jealous that I didn’t think of something so clever).
Read Lois’s piece if you want to know what I think (though longtime readers of my blog know that I think most plans to charge for content are foolhardy).
Other takes on the paywall (I call it a wall; even if you don’t hit it immediately, it will stop most people who hit it) that I recommend:
Cory Doctorow (my favorite of these)
Ken Doctor 2 (Ken calls it a pay fence; he thinks it’s a good idea, but has some tough questions)
Staci Kramer 2 (an unofficial FAQ; here’s the Times’ official FAQ)
Nat Ives’ interview with Times CEO Janet Robinson
New York Times story by Jeremy W. Peters
Business Insider explains how to read the Times (and the Wall Street Journal) without paying.
I used this clip once before, but it seems especially appropriate now, given the Times’ recent unsuccessful attempt at another paywall:
This just strikes me as an attempt to double down on print. Everything about the plans say people should buy the Sunday print edition.
That may make the most sense for the short term, but it’s not a great long-term strategy.
What I find the most mind boggling is the $40MM-$50MM price tag that Bloomberg reported for building the pay wall infrastructure. That is just insane. You’re already 200,000 subscriptions in the hole before you’ve started.
More thoughts here:
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Thanks for appreciating the Star Wars metaphor. I only wish that I had gone off more about it.
But what I basically meant was this: The nature of the pay ramp means that the vast majority of people will still get free content from the Times. They’ll only be able to ask people who come to the site regularly to pony up some money. And that amount of money will have to be high enough to compensate for the loss in advertising dollars (when X percent of readers leave) and low enough that the X percent [of people who leave] is as low as possible.
Thus – even if they hit the sweet spot, I don’t think it will be a game-changer or a 100+million dollar revenue stream as Steve “obviously has a dog in the race” Brill seems to think (I honestly think that’s how people should refer to him whenever they quote his 100 million dollar figure).
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I’m laughing about the dog.
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Thanks, Dave and Rocky. Dave, I suggested your Star Wars metaphor for Nick Bergus’ collection of news metaphors (http://nbergus.com/category/news-metaphor/), so he might give it a little more attention, too.
Even if the Times comes up with a $100 million revenue stream (and yes, Brill has every reason to inflate that), I wonder how much they could have generated if they had turned all that time, energy and money to something that was truly innovative.
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[…] the con side is Steve Buttry who makes an excellent point that in many ways this is a digitalization of a print subscriber […]
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