The fun part is that the paywall is extremely porous. There has never been a case that I could not access a nytimes content because of the paywall. Sadly their pricing is above what I would consider good value for money so I am not a converted subscriber yet.
I am glad that this is working model/experiment. To not alienate much of the eyeballs while putting effort to make the paying subscribers experience better.
So, I subscribed for a couple years, but cancelled six months ago when I left the country for a sojourn in Europe. I am returning to the States next week and I fully intend to re-subscribe to the Times.
I'm curious what price you would be willing to pay for access to all of the Times content.
Personally, I find that 15 USD a month is a fair price for an abundance of news that seems high quality (perhaps I've been duped?). There's all the multimedia, the arts section, the magazine, and, of course the news (both world and US).
Do you not enjoy as many sections as I do? Or do you share my interests but find 15 USD too steep a price for the content?
I also wonder, does means affect your choice? I recognize that the value of money is sometimes inversely related to how much you have.
I'm not interested in reading all of that the Times.
$15 per month is too much for a bunch of content that I'm mostly not interested in.
In theory I'm paying £200 per year for Wall Street Journal; £270 for Financial Times (standard, not premium); £117 for the Economist - well, these three are nearly $1,000 per year. Add in a UK daily paper (because that's where I live); and Private Eye, and something like Monocle and the costs are easily over $1,000 per year.
So, I gently write to newspapers and ask them to include tipjars on articles (so they know how much people actually value good writing); and I leave ads turned on but ask for single-article payment systems to allow me to view ad-free articles; and I hope that something gets done to implement micro-payments because it'd be awesome.
My orginal parent post claims that a month of NYTimes content isn't as valuable as/worth 15 USD.
Are you saying the NYTimes is not a good value or that, it's simply not a product you seek because you're already amply satisfied by WSJ, FT, the Economist, etc.?
It just seems weird to me to call something too expensive when the real reason is that you've already purchased it, just from someone else.
Unless you think the cost to journalistic quality ratio of the aforementioned papers and magazines is superior to the NYT?
I don't want all of it. I want a couple of articles a week. Those articles are worth $0.50 at most to me; but probably much less. (I have no idea how much they'd get for ads for my view for any articles I want to read).
I mention those other journals because there is so much good journalism that buying all of it for a whole year is not practical for most people. People will pick and chose. At the moment they chose to include one paper for a year and exclude other papers for that year. But it'd be better if they could just pick and chose and pay for any individual article they wanted to read.
My price point is somewhat close to 4-5 USD per month. Since the only things that are really irreplaceable there for me are the Krugman, Collins and Dowd columns. For other stuff there are more tightly focused news outlets that serve my needs better.
Also I have never been fan of the subscription model when it is about consuming content and not providing service.
Agreed with this - all it checks is whether you've redirected from a NYTimes page to get to the article you're trying to get to, so it's very easy to spoof...
But I believe that NYT reporters are providing a pretty important public service, especially in this day and age of many "journalists" not taking the time to do more than parrot official talking points. Not saying the Times never does this, but they do have some of the better reporting in the industry in my experience.
When I step past a public lawn and it has a sign up saying "please don't step on the grass" my first thought is not "gee, this is an insult to my intelligence, they could have at least put up a fence."
The NYT paywall is meant to be a deterrent or an annoyance, not an iron curtain.
Nor is it my first thought. But, nobody's asking me to pay to use the lawn in that case, so I don't find it a particularly compelling analogy. If the sign said something like "Please pay $1 to use the lawn" I might find it similarly insulting, or at the very least, I would question the intelligence of the person who put it up.
The paywall is not much of a deterrent and circumventing it isn't terribly annoying, either. While I am sure there are plenty of people who pay for a subscription because they feel the content is worth the money, I would guess that there are far more who pay because they lack the computer literacy to know how to edit the address bar in their browser. I find it distasteful to make money off of others' ignorance, and i find it insulting because the success of the business model hinges on the hope that we are all that ignorant.
> If the sign said something like "Please pay $1 to use the lawn" I might find it similarly insulting, or at the very least, I would question the intelligence of the person who put it up.
But you are using the lawn. Keep that in mind. You are demanding they enforce their pricing scheme.
You're effectively the kid who ignored the "Please take only 1" sign above the bowl of candy on Halloween.
If you don't find that analogy compelling, don't bother commenting. Those types of comments are, in essence, "Well actually"-type posts which are insulting to the community here.
> I would guess that there are far more who pay because they lack the computer literacy to know how to edit the address bar in their browser.
It's probably a mixture of people that would cheat if they knew how and people who simply choose to be honest. It's hard to ascertain how big each of those categories is.
Compare the NYT with Adobe here. They both have lousy protection against piracy because they see piracy as the lowest tier in a price discrimination scheme. Poor student who can't pay? Sure, go ahead and circumvent whatever barriers we've put up. Can pay? Then do.
In any case, I don't find "if only people were smarter, they could cheat more" to be a very compelling argument.
I am glad that this is working model/experiment. To not alienate much of the eyeballs while putting effort to make the paying subscribers experience better.