Four lines of code for The New York Times’ paywall
niemanlab.org
niemanlab.org
I think they've done a fair job of trying to handhold users through the transition. I expect the success or failure of the paywall not to depend on the fact of the paywall itself (obviously), but on how easy and frictionless they'll make it to pay. If they can make it graceful enough, I will happily pay for content I know there are loopholes for accessing. If it's a clusterfuck, as with other DRM schemes, I'll either seek out the leaks or give up.
I'm hoping they've adopted something like this approach, a slightly more rigorous version of the NPR pledge model, and are relying on the goodwill and intelligence of their readership and not its stupidity.
It's an interesting experiment, I read more than 20 articles from NYTimes.com a month, but I don't need more than a few. If the blogosphere starts pointing to the BBC instead, I'll end up reading that.
I should probably mention that it's my code (if we can call it that) we're talking about. The traffic is killing my blog now, but I a few hours ago made it out of curiosity if I could hack that (it was 20 minutes all in).
The NYT does have a really hard problem to solve though. How do you securely police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't trust cookies, can't put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses change all the time without requiring even a free account to read the content?
They are trying to come up with a modern pay solution to journalism and for that I give them props. It's not going to be an easy road though.
You assume that the number of people with the ability and desire to circumvent your defenses is a small fraction of your total audience, and ignore them.
I'm loading that code dynamically from the bookmarklet because I assume that they'll change the ids of the divs at some point.
In a certain country, you may want to add.
Some people are arguing whether the country in question is more of a representative republic or of a democracy ((guess that's enough of snarkiness for one short post)).
They seem to have spent $40M building it and dropped their stock price 3% on the first day it was live. That's a lot of $40 annual subscriptions just to cover the cost of putting it in place.