Posted on 02/07/2011 6:49:33 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
The New York Times is preparing to introduce multiple subscription packages for access to the paper's website and other digital content, kicking off the biggest test to date of consumers' willingness to pay for news they're accustomed to getting free.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Dallas Morning News has the same crazy idea.
I wouldn’t pay a nickel for it.
Isn’t this the 2nd time they’re trying it..wasn’t there a “Times Select” a while back, which bombed, and was dropped..I mean..you’d have to PAY ME to read the Times..
Hmmm . . . free content from any of a thousand sources, or pay for the NYT bias and often lower quality reporting in general. That’s a tough call for only a few people.
When they start be unbiased and truthful...hmmm, nope guess not.
If they won’t read it when it’s free, why will anybody read it when they charge?..........
This will be an interesting experiment. WSJ made a huge mistake, IMHO, by requiring even its print subscribers to have to pay a subscription to access on-line content. It’s amazed me they’ve made their model viable.
NYT, in the meantime, has gotten people very used to free on-line content. To try and now charge for something people used to get for free is going to be an uphill battle. OTOH, it’s not clear how much longer print version is even going to be able to survive. But with this week’s debut of The Daily, perhaps news readers are going to start getting used to paying for electronic news read through a tablet device. Print used to have a big advantage over electronic since it was much more portable and easy to read anywhere. But tablets largely eradicate that advantage and if anything give electronic format a big advantage over print: clickable links that take you directly to a document being discussed or to other on-line content that provides far more depth than a reporter could ever pack into the story etc.
A fool and his money are soon parted. :)
“Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit outta muh hat!”
any thing that keeps krugman away from the huddled masses is a good thing.
You can’t line a bird cage with an on-line subscription.
Your first para has several factual errors. The overwhelming majority of WSJ subscriptions are business related. When the online journal was introduced, they only charged a small additional amout to ADD the online version. IOW..you really can’t separate the two..If you ONLY want the online WSJ, it will cost you about as much as if you took the print paper also. The WSJ business model is very successful. It also saves them a huge amount of printing costs, and has done so for years, as now 99% of financial data, is only available on line...stock tables in print are as rare as classified ads in print..
Good bye, NYT.
This is gonna be hilarious! They’re gonna find even their beloved neo-Marxists won’t pay hard redistributed bucks for a passel of lies when they can get all the lies fit to print in beaucoup other places for nada.
I don’t remember the numbers anymore and maybe my perspective is biased by having access to a deeply discounted educational rate. But as a rough approximation, I think I was paying only $175 annually for print version, but would have had to pay at least $80 a year more for the “privilege” on getting on-line content.
In contrast to print version, which takes real paper to produce and a delivery system using warm bodies and vehicles to get it to my house, the marginal cost of giving me on-line access is close to $0. In that context, having to pay a 50% “tax” for this privilege seemed like gouging—especially since so much of the content I care about, e.g., Op-Eds actually was available at no cost anyway through sites such as RealClearPolitics. It was the principle more than the price, but maybe from WSJ’s perspective they were already losing money on me given how they’d price their print copy.
“Online readers would get free access to a certain number of pages on the website each month before they are prompted to sign up for a subscription for additional material, an approach currently used by the Financial Times”
LOL! They all keep the count in a cookie. All you have to do is clear your cookies when you reach the limit!
So that basically means the count limit affects only the ignorant or stupid. Of course, the ignorant and stupid are The Slimes’s natural constituency, so hey, maybe they’ll rake in a few of those redistributed bucks after all!
“As a free site, the Times online attracts more than 30 million monthly unique visitors, according to comScore Inc. Those visitors fuel over $100 million a year in advertising on the website, according to people familiar with the matter.”
Ruh Roh. Guess they’re toying with the idea of trading 100 mil for a few hundred thou when they erect their paywall. (BTW, only a moron would believe The Slimes is pulling down 100 mil on their website.)
Nope. You can’t polish a turd.
When they get 10% of the the Rush 24/7 subscribers, please let me know.
OH NO, MR. BILL! The Slimes is erecting a paywall! Oh, whatever shall I do! Oh, wait. I don’t read all the lies fit to print in The Slimes anyway. Never mind.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.