NYTimes to start charging for access to their website. | Hacker News Reader

NYTimes to start charging for access to their website.

nytimes.com

63 pointsjs330964 comments

I've been hoping for this for over a year now. I'm _more_ than happy to support their journalists oversea and at home (USA for me, as for the NYT). Without some sort of support, we wouldn't be getting the same breadth and depth and quality of news.

It astonishes me when people think this should be free. KNowledge should be free, yes, but news that costs money and much, much time to acquire and then disseminate _does_ cost money and I'm glad to pay for it.

This is high quality journalism from hard working people: asking them to do it for less and less is ridiculous. Content is tangible, to me at least, and worth money, just as a few lines of code "anybody" could write is also worth quite a bit.

Me, too, but I hope they get their price-point right.

Paying $50 for TimesSelect to read the OpEd writers and a few other articles was way too much for me.

I'm an American living in Europe, and the NYTimes is the best place for me to get my American news "fix". The core reporting is what I really value and am happy to pay for.

It was too much for the OpEd writers, too; they don't like being locked inside a paywall any more than the rest of us like being locked outside of one.

I don't disagree with your statements but that doesn't mean I'll be paying and here is why: I read articles from probably 15 different sites every day (and not same 15 from day to day). I simply can't afford to pay a subscription to every one of those sites nor do I want pay for just one site and get my news from a single source.

The problem is that this the same dead-tree business model moved to the web. It might appeal to people who consume their information in the classical morning newspaper way but I suspect that is a dwindling market.

It seemed obvious to me in 1994 that Web content syndication was eventually going to be the answer to your question ("How can I afford to subscribe to 15 different providers?")

People laughed at me then, they laughed at me when I said it again around 2000, and they'll laugh at me now.... but that still doesn't change the fact that it needs to happen, and eventually will.

It could be that the coming wave of tablet/e-reader platforms will be the last piece of the syndication puzzle. It's a safe guess that the New York Times will have someone at the Apple event next week, pitching a subscription deal. If they offer me access to several other major metro papers/special-interest broadsheets along with that NYT subscription, they've got a deal.

I don't understand how you make the jump from "I want to support this company" to "everyone should be forced to support this company". If you want to support them, there are ways you can do it currently, so if you really want to support them than you would have done it already. Are you saying that you want them to be supported, but you want other people to shoulder the cost?

I think charging or not for their services is definitely the NYTimes's prerogative. That doesn't mean that it's a good choice. Personally, I think it's a bad choice, because they're going to alienate some of their most loyal readers. I, too, wish that the neswpapers could find a sustainable way to remain profitable, but I don't think this is it. But if there is no sustainable way, I guess that means that newspapers actually aren't as valuable to us as we like to think, because otherwise we'd be willing to pay for it.

everyone should be forced to support this company

They're not trying to force anybody to support them. They're changing their business model in order to allow their customers to support them.

Nobody is forcing you to read NYT, if you don't want to pay, don't read it.

(I probably won't be paying, and I disagree with this, but it is their company to do with what they please)

>>"There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.

Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP-based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.

So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?

Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?

Although you may be able to bypass their protection, even if it's a simple cookie authentication, the whole operation will probably not be a failure. Presumably most people they are targeting, who might be willing to pay for a subscription, aren't tech-savvy enough and lack the motivation to get around it.

Are you somehow implying that a pay-wall can't be built? Porn sites seem to have figured it out quite a while ago so I don't see how NYTimes would be any different.

Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to a friend but that generally isn't a problem.

Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid for it anyway.

I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism they think of can probably be circumvented easily.

Most people would rather be honest and pay a few dollars than mess with cookies/proxies/multiple accounts, especially if they don't know what a cookie is in the first place.

If someone values his time sufficiently low to make several email accounts to read the NYT without paying... he probably can't/won't pay, whatever is done.

That's a very fair point. My only counter to it is that us geeks will spread the word that using Chrome in incognito mode is quite effective.

Ctrl-Shift-N is quite fast, and Google is pushing Chrome very hard, and us geeks are called on for tech support quite often.

I think your honesty thought will win out most of the time, but not always. People like a free lunch and sticking it to the man, especially if they have the tools to do it very easily. We'll see.

Wait, wait! Are you trying to tell us that NYTimes' content is as valuable as porn?

I beg to differ, Sirrah!

Also, if you, ah, investigate online porn, you'll find that the on-line porn sites seem to have a gentleman's agreement to not get all huffy if the occasional, incomplete picture set leaks to a free site.

It's not a "gentleman's agreement", it's promotional material.

The porn sites themselves build the picture sets and if you have an affiliate account with them you see the available material (along with all the relevant html code that you can customize to match your colour scheme or whatnot and that already has your referral codes in place) and pick what you want to use on your own site.

It's basic affiliate marketing.

Do it with sign ins and require you to validate the account with a phone number (a la Craigslist). That has been incredibly effective at CL.

Why not just do it with IP address? Too annoying for most people to spoof. The few who have shared IP addresses get screwed, not really a big deal.

I don't suppose this means that subscribers will get a version without banner ads. In the same way that newspapers have historically sold their print version for less than it cost to publish and made their money off print ads and classifieds, I imagine we'll get much the same experience but be paying for it. NYT doesn't want to trade ad revenue for subscriber revenue. They want to augment it.

BUUUUUT, since the internet is a dynamic medium, maybe they could offer a tiered pricing scheme (like every other for-pay web app these days) that includes a no ads option. It should be easy enough: just display the print version of the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/21/business/media/21times.htm...

The NYT used to have a pay model. I paid them something like $8/mo. I didn't really use what I got over the free side of the site, but I wanted to support their journalism. After a few months I got an email that they would no longer be billing me.

In other news, "billybob to stop reading nytimes.com"

I had the same initial response where robg == billybob. Then I started thinking "why must good content be free?". The best alternatives (Economist, WSJ) all charge and I'm not about to start reading cnn.com. Perhaps the BBC site.

I could cobble together a morning read from other sources. I guess it just depends on their pricing model. I'm willing to listen, at least.

Good daily news must be free, because the facts are free and there are too many places that will freely distribute those facts.

Good content, on the other hand, does not have to be daily news. Which is the distinction I wish more newspaper companies would understand. You'll never get people to pay for box scores or reprints from the AP/Reuters. You will get people to pay for investigative journalism, quality insight, in depth reporting, etc.

The Times would have a better chance at monetizing if they stuck to such a 'members' section concept. Another under-appreciated fact overlooked in most monetization schemes: people will pay for the ability to comment and be given preferential comment placement. And when only subscribers can comment, it's far easier to police for spam and moderate for civility.

Are the facts really free? Take what's happening in Haiti. What's free there? Seems like a lot of very difficult work to me.

Interesting last point. Citation?

Perhaps the term is "cheap" instead. Because once someone has broadcast "the facts" it is very cheap to inform everyone else.

How do you properly compensate those that do the hardest work in getting "the facts" if endless copies can be made cheaply?

I suppose the answer is something like iTunes for the news. However, I'm not confident that market forces can pick the best reporting. I mean, Fox News does really well financially. How many people do they have in Haiti?

The difficult-to-collect facts would be those necessary for in-depth and investigative pieces. I specifically called that out above as being pay-worthy. I can absolutely see for-pay access to those news pieces.

What doesn't work --can't work-- is charging for things like box scores, election results, stock news, press releases, traffic/crime/weather. (Excepting perhaps extremely time-sensitive subsets of that data.)

And if the NYTimes isn't discriminating between their quality, signature content and simple daily news - the customer isn't going to either. They're just going to be frustrated that if they try to use the NY Times for more than 1 big story a month, they're penalized. Or, god forbid, try to read the NYTimes.com at work, at the library or at a coffee shop...

There's certainly a one-time cost in gathering and validating facts (though I'd be surprised if much time at all was spent validating these days). But as facts can't be protected as intellectual property, they will inevitably be repeated, bringing the ultimate cost to consumers down to the cost of distribution. Which, today, is pretty close to $0.

Also, increasingly, facts are self-reported by the audience. Who needs an international bureau when they can simply search for native sources? (e.g. Where does the average reader get their facts regarding the Iranian protests?) Events involving widespread infrastructure failure (Haiti) are an exception.

... You want a citation for it being easier to moderate paying subscribers vs anonymous posts?

The Iranian protests are a good example where we don't know the impact without some context. They appear powerful and yet it could just be a vocal (and tech savvy) minority.

Where do people pay to comment and get preferential placement?

The Iranian protests also draw into sharp relief the assumption of quality on the part of information gathering by 'real' news sources.

How long was it until American news even acknowledged the protests existed? And how much are they truly vetting their facts, when they run transparent propaganda (government dismissal of the actions of a 'few hundred' when nearly a dozen independent sources contributed pictures of at least tens of thousands) and trivially photoshop 'counter-demonstrations'?

Citizen-journalism has its flaws, but it's very similar to the case of Wikipedia (for lack of a more succinct explanation): Any one person could easily post lies, but lies tend to get exposed and corrected. And in the aggregate, it's more accurate than any individual 'expert' or 'authoritative' source.

Fark is the stand-by example of preferential comment treatment. TotalFark subscribers are kicking in $5/mo for early access to a veritable cess pit of dupes and spam, in exchange for getting first crack at discussion and token member features.

I also have personal experience with several small discussion boards that went for-pay specifically to squash spam and cover the moderator costs of abusive behavior.

It's pretty easy to see where making people give you $5 before they can post shifts the economics of spamming, flaming, harassing, etc.

No kidding. I dropped WSJ.com last year and don't miss it.

The Internet delivers a WORLD of news sites meaning the traditional publishers have less of a voice than they did when paper was the sole medium.

Their proposed pay wall may ensnare existing readers, but who in his right mind is going to subscribe having never had a relationship with this provider before? "Oh, you want money for that story, the same story I can see a 1,000 versions of in Google News? Buh-bye."

I'd love to see the evidence that supports this decision. This reeks of someone trying to save his job.

Aren't most of those other sites derivative though? They opine on the news reported by others (or just copy/paste), and often poorly without relevant context. Moreover, I kinda like one-stop shopping for World, National, Business, and Technology news. It's not perfect, given journalistic biases, but it's often good enough.

I may be biased though. I grew up delivering and reading the newspaper.

I grew up delivering and reading newspapers and this has only shown me that the vast majority of "news" is just re-hashed press releases, or opinionated FUD.

The vast majority of my round bought the Daily Mail (who supported the facists in the UK, "hoorah the black shirts") or The Sun (famous for their "HIV is only catchable by homosexuals" opinion).

The world would be a better place without most of the newspapers out there. Quality reporting is another matter all together and is NOT synonymous with the term "newspapers".

I grew up delivering a state paper. They did quality reporting about the small state. They still do. But I don't see how they survive without going hyperlocal. The problem is my parents (i.e., the generation that still subscribes) want a general news product in addition to the local stuff.

Largely the same discussion happened on this item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058507

Probably there's not much point reading that rather than this, but I thought I'd make the connection since I noticed it.

Also reported here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060009

A connection is suggestion with the release of the Apple tablet.

"But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading. They stressed that the amount of free access could change with time, in response to economic conditions and reader demand."

Given the widely accepted disaster that was TimesSelect, this doesn't seem to be off to a promising start. How do you make such a monumental decision about your business, announce it publically, and say, yeah, we'll figure out how this will work soon, get back to us in a few months.

And it's not just business strategy. As pierrefar notes in another thread, they haven't figured out how they're going to achieve this anyway...

Will they deindex from Google? Wi

"Starting in early 2011..." that's an age away in internet time. Things could have changed considerably by then.

It's just one year...the Internet in early 2009 wasn't all that much different from now. I frequent the same websites I did back then, personally.

As an example of a large change in 2009, Facebook went from 150 million active users to 350 million active users ( http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline ). I consider that a fairly large change in the consumer web.

Actually... you're right! I completely forgot that I registered on Facebook last summer :)

It's an entire year to look like they're doing something

<sarcasm>I didn't realize anyone still read traditional news outlets.</sarcasm>

Well, maybe only slightly sarcastic.

This is the death-knell of the traditional news media. When they start actively driving consumers away by charging for services once rendered free, there is no way they will be able to recover. The Internet has enabled citizen journalists to get inside the established media's OODA loop and take them out. Established media is too slow and too antiquated to ever be able to catch up, let alone get ahead and stay ahead.

Can you point me to some good citizen journalism then?

http://talkingpointsmemo.com http://fivethirtyeight.com

Any that aren't about US politics?

I honestly don't think the metered approach will work for them. Most people will hit that point, and instead of paying will search for, and find, they have other alternatives. In the end, NY Times will just lose most of those regulars as the alternative becomes the primary source.

The free service right now (having a 'mini newspaper' emailed to you every morning) is nice, but to be honest, I would value this at about $1/month, but I might pay up to $1.50/month to support journalism. I suspect that they will want to charge more than this.

You're basically willing to trade one cup of coffee for a month of decent journalism, but no more?

And at $1.50 it's not going to be a particularly good cup of coffee.

But I'm in the same boat. I already shell out ~$100 a year for the Economist, and various other subscriptions. If I have to start paying for all the news SOURCES I read I'm going to be out a great deal more. Note I said SOURCES. I'm willing to pay for news, but not a monthly subscription to a news site I only read occasionally.

Maybe there's a business model to be had for a decent aggregator? I know I'd pay (how much is the sticking point) for a nice mashup of NYT, WSJ, and Economist content. That might be my dream news publication, actually.

This almost sounds like you'd be willing to pay dues to the AP or Reuters. I don't think that's such a bad idea. I know it would never fly in America but a funding system similar to the BBC, where households have to purchase licenses for things, might work well.

To me, there are order of magnitude differences between good news sites and regular news sites. NYTimes is, in my mind, the best of the best, so I would have no problem with paying. Actually, I'm glad to see them respect their own content enough to charge for it. The advice to consultants is always to not undervalue their time, yet the advice to big companies always seems to be to undervalue their products.

Don't think about it in terms of news. News is everywhere. In-depths reports, amazing visualizations, and insightful editorials are not everywhere, and NYTimes does these better than anyone else I know. I think they have earned the right to charge.

The problem with charging for news is that news as it's presented is unspectacular. Most people, if they don't have to-- won't pay for unspectacular information because chances are they can get it somewhere else because it isn't hard to produce or duplicate. I can get the same information from the NY Times at the Washpost. I do like their opeds though. I read David Brooks a lot. But I still won't pay for David Brooks' insight because it doesn't make me money or save me time or do something to make my life easier. That's the only kind of information you can form a business model around.

How long will it be before someone implements an NYTimesShare, a la GoogleShare (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1062495)? If they allow a certain amount of free then all you need to do is change your cookies periodically.

To be sure, outfits like the NYT that bring the public high quality news need to make enough money to pay the bills and their staff. I just don't know if this is the plan that will work.

The NYT's target demographic is the top 40% of income producers middle age and older. They don't know how to reach us, and they're not worried about it for another few years. If they lose us (in a general sense here), they're not too worried yet. At that point, they'll start hiring people like Kos and other top bloggers on both sides of the isle as their columnists and target us.

Most people under 35 scoff at paying a newspaper because they news they print is not targeted at us.

I agree with John Gruber, who cited this tweet from Dave Winer (developer, entrepreneur, writer, and a pioneer of RSS and podcasting):

"My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they'd just do it."

http://twitter.com/davewiner/status/7990139921

I'm interested to see if paid subscribers have ads alongside their articles. I would consider paying it to contribute to good journalism AND have fewer ads (I am aware of AdBlock, however, I am also aware of how the Internet economy current works.)

See cable as an example.

Only channels I know that do not have any ads are the movie channels (HBO etc).

So I doubt NYTimes will pass up potential revenue from displaying ads to subscribers. Just that these ads will be more targeted and focused depending on the audience.

It's really quite surprising that it's taken this long to reach the decision, and it will take another year before people start paying anything.

No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.

> No mention of what will happen to the currently free (and super) iPhone/iTouch app.

I assume it will sadly turn into the WSJ app (few free articles, majority subscriber-only).

Of course, I can see Steve Jobs and Apple working a deal with the NYTimes to bundle a free 1-yr subscription for their iSlate owners.

Speaking of the iPhone/iTouch app, I would love to see a caching HN app. I read NYT on my iPod Touch (without wireless) most days when I walk to/from work, but I would switch to a substitute news source rather than pay.

This again? I thought the TimesSelect experience proved that this model doesn't work.

I wonder if they'd be net better off adopting a pay-what-you-want model.

Great -- I'd like to support their journalism efforts and I'm not interested in home delivery.

Keeping the poor uninformed is important for modern democracy.

Can anyone explain the downvotes ? Surely my point is valid even if couched in the sarcasm of devils advocacy - are sarcasm tags needed ?

A democracy cannot function without an informed public. The press has traditionally been seen as the main guarantor of keeping people informed. Creating a paywall is exclusiory to the less well off. This therefore makes the United States less democratic.

Can I please be argued with rather than downvoted or is there no such thing as netiquette these days ?

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