New York Times set to charge, again
The New York Times is set to return to charging for access to its website. The site went free in 2007 presumably in the belief that the firm could make more money from advertising than it could from subscriptions. This is set to change - a spokeswoman for the paper confirmed changes were coming but said it was still working out …
NY Times to lose massive amounts of readers, ad revenue, and market share.
Charging readers for something they can get for free elsewhere - yeah way to go...last one out switch the light off.
How many people click through to their articles from blog postings, news aggregators, etc... Lot's of times I'll see "free (sign-up required)" or something to that effect denoted for NYT, but I've never seen those type sites include links to subscriber-only articles, which makes me think they'll stop including NYT articles.
Page impressions will decrease. Revenues from subscriptions will increase. Advertising revenue will remain constant or increase - smaller audience but more accurate demographic qualification.
Losing billions of clicks / page impressions from 3rd world / low income visitors isn't going to hurt the business model.
> Charging readers for something they can get for free elsewhere -
Yeah good luck in your legal fight with News Corps lawyers after they find your site stealing their content.
I too remember the free registration nag screen, mainly because for some reason the site could never remember I'd already registered. Pretty quickly I just stopped following links.
If they turned registration off in 2007 that should be a warning to the idiots, I didn't notice, haven't seen any of their content or ads since and likely wouldn't have checked back ever. A moment to lose eyeballs, a lifetime to get them back.
I wish them luck.
The net/ world is being harmed by everyone thinking that everything should be free.
If the fee is reasonable, I am in there.
I like newspapers. I hope they survive.
But don't follow me. I often support the losing side.
I'll shed a tear. Just one, though.
Its baby turd, The Boston Globe, recently just missed being flushed. In the near future, they'll both be history.
When the Times was a "reporting" agency, she was an elegant Old Lady.
As a liberal whore she is of no use to anyone. Finish her off.
If they begin charging, and don't eliminate the ads (or at least the high BW/CPU flash ads), i'll stop reading the NYT altogether. I don't have a problem with text ads, they done use up too much of my monthly bandwidth, and I have sent several e-mails to their advertising department with screencaps showing quite lengthy articles where the right-hand-column ads are only displayed on the top 1/3 - 1/2 of the article....essentially they were wasting 1/2-2/3 of their advertising area. And, do you know, 1) I never heard back from them and 2) I still see this because they apparently never preview their own pages.
If the print edition went out with one column 1/2-2/3 blank, you can be sure that someone would find themselves unemployed.
