NYT's Lame "Premium Service" Thing
So, I'm sure everyone's already heard about this:
Come Monday, Sept. 19, fans of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks will have to break out their credit cards. Sept. 19 is the launch date of TimesSelect, a new subscription service designed to diversify the newspaper's revenue stream beyond traditional Web site advertising.
The popular Op-Ed columnists are the main selling point behind the $49.95 a year subscription. (The service will be free for the paper's home delivery subscribers). The paper's news, features, editorials, and analysis will remain free, as will interactive graphics, multimedia, and video.
I understand why New York Times wants to try and make as much money as they can, but this is an incredibly dumb way to do it. From Michael at AmericaBlog:
I think the NYT decision to start charging for certain sections of the paper is a terrible idea -- and not just because they serve a public function and it would be noble, blah blah blah. Billions of dollars are flowing into Internet ads. The New York Times is making money off of that. And what's happening online? Literally millions of blogs are DRIVING TRAFFIC to the websites of the major newspapers. Traffic at the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and more must be through the roof. Literally MILLIONS of people are likely to see a NYT article trumpted by the blogs (or simply accessed by people with internet access overseas) than ever before in history.
The NYT -- without any effort on its part -- is gaining a massive new audience, a ton of eyeballs either going to or being urged to go to its website. If they can't make money off of that, they don't deserve to stay in business. And erecting a wall to keep out all the people you could be exposing to ads and making money off of is just stupid. It makes sense for the Wall Street Journal and its very select, wealthy readership. It makes absolutely no sense for a mainstream newspaper like the NYT.
What's going to happen instead of bloggers linking directly to Maureen Dowd's latest column at nytimes.com is that people will figure out a way to illegally access the material, copy & paste it into their own blogs, and then the AmericaBlogs or DailyKos's of the world will link from there.
If hackers in Toyko have already figured out how to make pirated UMD movies for PSP, it won't be too long before we have hacked NYT columns floating around.
Come Monday, Sept. 19, fans of New York Times columnists Maureen Dowd, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks will have to break out their credit cards. Sept. 19 is the launch date of TimesSelect, a new subscription service designed to diversify the newspaper's revenue stream beyond traditional Web site advertising.
The popular Op-Ed columnists are the main selling point behind the $49.95 a year subscription. (The service will be free for the paper's home delivery subscribers). The paper's news, features, editorials, and analysis will remain free, as will interactive graphics, multimedia, and video.
I understand why New York Times wants to try and make as much money as they can, but this is an incredibly dumb way to do it. From Michael at AmericaBlog:
I think the NYT decision to start charging for certain sections of the paper is a terrible idea -- and not just because they serve a public function and it would be noble, blah blah blah. Billions of dollars are flowing into Internet ads. The New York Times is making money off of that. And what's happening online? Literally millions of blogs are DRIVING TRAFFIC to the websites of the major newspapers. Traffic at the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and more must be through the roof. Literally MILLIONS of people are likely to see a NYT article trumpted by the blogs (or simply accessed by people with internet access overseas) than ever before in history.
The NYT -- without any effort on its part -- is gaining a massive new audience, a ton of eyeballs either going to or being urged to go to its website. If they can't make money off of that, they don't deserve to stay in business. And erecting a wall to keep out all the people you could be exposing to ads and making money off of is just stupid. It makes sense for the Wall Street Journal and its very select, wealthy readership. It makes absolutely no sense for a mainstream newspaper like the NYT.
What's going to happen instead of bloggers linking directly to Maureen Dowd's latest column at nytimes.com is that people will figure out a way to illegally access the material, copy & paste it into their own blogs, and then the AmericaBlogs or DailyKos's of the world will link from there.
If hackers in Toyko have already figured out how to make pirated UMD movies for PSP, it won't be too long before we have hacked NYT columns floating around.