Comments on: There’s no reason an NYT paywall won’t work

By: Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:57:10 +0000

I understand and completely agree with your point. I guess what I'm wondering is whether the conversation will really go away? If the article limit is set high enough, bloggers and tweeters and your everyday user of facebook and digg can link to an NYT article confident that 98% of all readers won't encounter a paywall.

By: Jerry Brito

Jerry Brito — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:57:10 +0000

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:56:24 +0000

The other thing that might be helpful for them to consider is better bundling the media through which they share their content. They're said that they want to be sure print subscribers get free access, but what about bundling NYTimes.com access with Kindle access? Since the marginal cost of electronic content is zero, why not let people already paying $15 a month for a Kindle subscription to the Times have free or extremely-low-cost (think $1 or $2 per month) access to the content behind the paywall? Presumably the Apple tablet will also have a newspaper subscription feature. So consider "access" to be $15 a month or whatever for the first medium and a buck or two for each additional medium (Kindle, tablet, iPhone app). It seems there are a lot of ways to play with the different NYT editions that would create both producer and consumer surpluses.

By: John Jackson

John Jackson — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:48:05 +0000

Let's look at the user who is a avid NYT reader, but not willing to pay. What will they do? Go elsewhere, but they are also taking their conversation with them. All the links they sent to friends via twitter / facebook / blog go with them. The NYT will totally removed from their conversations, not only because they may not be able to see the links received from their friends, but they don't know if the links will work for their friends. All this linking is important in driving traffic going forward. I don't look for news, news finds me. News is filtered and sorted by my social network. Putting up partial pay walls is essentially making their links unreliable. Unreliable links are filtered out in the social web.