NYT reducing number of free articles available before paywall | Hacker News Reader

NYT reducing number of free articles available before paywall

nytimes.com

33 pointsdmd14926 comments

So they're lowing their relevance, and hn readers find this unappealing, fine, but can we really view this as anything but a hopeful indication that they drive more revenue by bringing the wall forward by ten articles.

The nytimes paywall has never been popular among the tech crowd, for obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.

In my mind there are two possible things going on here:

1. The paywall is working to a degree, they have tested a reduced number of free articles and it leads to a higher conversion, and they are making this move to increase revenue.

2. The paywall is failing, an executive is concerned about meeting their revenue targets, and is going forward with an untested free article decrease as a ditch effort.

Let's hope it's the first, or at least a vaguely responsible combination of the two.

I hate the skeezy way they quote their subscription fees: "First four weeks $99 cents" against a regular price of $15 or more per 4 weeks. Why 4 weeks and not per month? Are they really trying to grab the extra partial billing cycle? Do they think their subscribers won't notice?

In contrast, The Economist has one price (in the US) for all their platforms, including print:

http://www.economist.com/products/subscribe/noreg

I dropped the NYT because they are charging nearly 4x what The Economist charges for a similar level of reporting. Switching to the Washington Post & LA Times wasn't as hard for me as the NYT seems to think.

I'm sure there are people for which 15$/month is a bit much, but I imagine for most HNers it's just a drop in the bucket.

Could someone explain their revulsion to paying for the NYTimes? They have expenses that need to be paid somehow. They produce a product that, although flawed[1], seems to do a good job of educating me about the world. I'm a satisfied online subscriber.

[1] OT: Among other things, they seem to have an obsession with pointing out the flaws of the PRC; especially the IHT articles.

It really is just a case of people's emotions largely being based around what they are used to. If a new industry came up that meant in 15 years we could all get great-quality cars for free, suddenly the idea of a normal car for £10k would seem hilariously insulting.

It would be interesting to hear the real answer to "Why is The Times changing its free access from 20 free articles a month to 10?" I guess they think hitting the wall at 10 instead of 20 will drive more subscriptions? I find that doubtful... as mentioned in another comment, the price is rather expensive and a huge step up from free. When I hit the pay wall, I just go "oh well" and read something else.

Or you can just open nytimes.com in private/incognito mode and read to your heart's content.

Or you can just push escape before the article hider finishes loading.

Or you can write a greasemonkey script that fixes it automatically.

Eh, NYT also reducing their online relevance then I guess.

$240/year for a digital subscription is absurd.

Not to mention that they still serve obnoxious ads when you have a subscription.

Exactly! I once wrote NYT feedback asking, “how much would I need to pay for a no-ad version?”

Their response was insulting. Essentially quoting the digital subscription rates without even addressing my question.

I assume it was just a form letter, and I have difficulty getting angry at / being insulted by form letters. It's an efficiency thing that probably adequately covers more inquiries than you would think. (Government is a different story; I get annoyed by government form letters because they're supposed to represent me, and if they can't be bothered with even pretending to listen, then it pisses me off.)

That's not to say I don't get frustrated at them, however. A few weeks ago, I was looking to buy Petzold's Code from Amazon.ca, and noticed that one of their pages, linked from the checkout page, listed the free shipping option for orders over $39. They had changed it to $25 probably more than a year ago at this point, presumably partially because that's the threshold for Amazon.com and partially because that's the free shipping price the otherwise more expensive Chapters.ca uses. I sent them a message telling them the listed threshold was wrong, with a screenshot, and explaining that I did know the real price by quoting it. They responded with a form letter telling me what the threshold was without any indication that anyone had noticed that I'd pointed out a problem with their site.

I sent a second message explaining that I'd got a form letter and this time they responded that the issue had been forwarded to the relevant department.

I just checked, and the incorrect value is still shown on the website. C'est la vie.

Why? That's the cost of two lunches per month for, as far as I'm concerned, the best English-language journalism available.

For the record, I pay $16 a month.

66 cents a day?

How much do you spend on coffee/tea/soda a day?

simply block cookie from their domain and set your referer to a google query, problem solved

The average HNer will know to do this but the majority of the internet won't. So they'll likely have the effect they want (reducing the number of unpaid pageviews) and a bunch of side-effects they don't want (drastically reducing their relevance as a source of information on the web)

[Edit: Grammar]

I was surprised at a family gathering recently how many of my in-laws reach the paywall and then clear their cookies. Even non-techies can work around the paywall.

If you disable javascript on the site you don't even need to ever bother with cookies. This prevents some multimedia parts of the site from working, but you can read all you want.

or just press "escape" as the page loads

You can also listen to NPR without donating.

In the documentary "Page One", http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787777/, the then executive editor of the NY Times said that they were basically adopting the NPR model: people who like it will pay for it.

That wasn't the executive editor of the NYT, that was Clay Shirky, the news-should-be-free guru. (Referenced here: http://www.sundance.org/festival/article/qa-page-one-a-year-...)

He wasn't speaking on behalf of the Times, he was speaking as an observer who is pretty firmly against pay walls. If you asked someone at the Times what their pay wall is, they'd say its the good old retail news model: Asking customers to pay money for your product.

There is an embarassing amount of whinging in this thread about paying $0.50 per day for what is probably the best newspaper in the country. I've been paying for the Times for several years now and it isn't even a blip on my budget.

I've always felt that gnashing of teeth over the NYT paywall was moot anyway, since any right-thinking person will have a print subscription to the Times for the crosswords.

This is so wrong. I hate crosswords. I read the NYT a lot. Back when I could, I paid them $8/mo. They no longer offer that option. I'm also allergic to newsprint, and I generally don't like handling a newpaper, so I won't be getting home delivery.

I am surprised they haven't also added a pay per article feature. I am very non-committal about subscriptions, but might fork over a buck to read one article.

New readers can already fork over a buck (well, 99c) for a four-week trial subscription - of course, plenty of people dislike that because they don't trust themselves to cancel in time.

The problem for subsequent use is that I suspect a.) very few people would be willing to pay $1/article (maybe $1/day might be more likely?) and b.) Bringing it down that cheap may well mean it will have fairly stupid credit card processing fees.

I'm not surprised. Even thugh I added scripts to defeat their paywall my viewing habits have changed from around five articles a day to five per month.

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