So, the New York Times announced that they're moving some content behind a paywall, and of course the chorus of "oh noes!" overshadowed any other messages they might have mentioned.
First, it's only the op-eds and columnists that are going to require payment to read. Great! I go to blogs for editorial; The Times is valuable to me for being really good journalism in the non-opinion parts of the paper.
Second, as I mentioned over on the ProNet blog, the Times is trying to build an affiliate program for paid content that would help bloggers make money for driving signups to TimesSelect. That's a good thing! I know a lot of people who make a few pennies by pushing people to Amazon to buy books that aren't available for free, and this seems pretty similar. I sure can't imagine anybody is so hard up for an opinion about current events that they can't find a source without paying for it. You just might want to pay to read a particularly well-read opinion.
Now, I wouldn't be a good blogger if I didn't call out the people who disagree with me, so I'll go to my friends, since they won't get pissed off.
First, Meg says, "Clearly, increased traffic would drive increased revenue in the form of online advertising. And in the long term, I believe it would generate more income than charging US$49.95 for an annual subscription." And Matt says, "if they took down the dumb account requirement and the $3.95 archives and instead opened up the 100+ years of archives to google and the rest of the web, I'm certain the advertising rewards from such an endeavor would outstrip any of these subscription ideas."
With all due respect to Matt and Meg, we've all had about a day or so to analyze the data on this and make our knee-jerk calls about how this will affect revenues. I'm sure it's somebody's full time job at Times Digital (I dunno who, but it's somebody) to run the numbers on this. That person's probably been playing with Excel for months to figure out exactly the implications of this.
And what we do on our blogs is, instead of saying "I don't like that this is behind a paywall", we say "you'd make more money if you did what we recommend" without offering any evidence. The Times is an organization founded on journalistic standards: Do you see why they might not believe such an assertion without evidence?
I'd love to have all the of Times' content available without pay. Hell, I'd love to have it all without ads, too. That's why I pay for the Sunday Times in print, so I can read the superior presentation, even though the same content's available for free online. (I'd pay for a better presentation online, too.)
But I don't have enough information to know exactly what informed their decision, so I wouldn't presume that I know their numbers better than they do. And even if I did, it wouldn't make that much difference to most bloggers: we'll all still be able to link to the hard news stories. We'll still be able to link to content that's syndicated on the International Herald Tribune, or Boston.com, or wherever else it appears. And maybe growing their revenues will help the Times make other services available to us for free, or to help improve the quality of what they publish. I'll wait and see.
Well I’m sure full timers working the numbers at the LA Times backed the decision to put CalendarLive behind the pay wall…before they reversed that decision.
Nobody knows “exactly the implications of this”. Or even close to “exactly”. It’s a experiment.
You’re right to be skeptical of instant analysis. But some of this analysis comes from people who think about this stuff as part of their profession.
+1 Gabe. Just because someone’s day job is to think of the implications of something doesn’t mean they’ve thought of or communicated all of them. Law of unintended consequences etc.
Responding to Matt, yes, the registration thing is dumb, but you can get around that with more than one method. Do actual humans use either method? Probably not, but because it’s dumb doesn’t mean you can’t bypass it.
Points on which I agree with Anil: weblogs are now the best source for editorial opinion. During the developments after 9/11 and the Iraq war, I had one trusted source of opnion and nuanced argument, and it wasn’t to be found in any newspaper. One source for such a thing was all I could take at the time, having unsubscribed from a print newspaper because of the overload of negative information. This is not just limited to news and American politics: individual weblogs are my subject-based opinion sources.
The implications of the New York Times closing some editorial content off from non-paying customers is not as potentially profound as the BBC opening up its archives to an API. Think of what would happen if the NY Times did that? The coolest part of an organization opening its huge data stores to a programmatic interface are not just the unintended ones, but the unimaginable-until-someone-makes-it uses. Linking to articles is fine for the old days, but letting people remix and reuse it in ways nobody’s thought of is far more mind-blowing.
Anil, I’m sure you’re right about the guy running the numbers, and obviously bloggers’ opinions are tilted towards the outcome that they would find most beneficial or that strengthen their vision of the Internet. But you’re missing two things, I think.
One, the numbers are just estimates, and depend on assumptions. The guy probably ran several scenarios, some that ended up positively and some negatively. If he followed the standard model of Times reporting, he came up with presumptive numbers of subscribers and lost ad revenue (based on whatever marketing studies they’ve conducted, of course) that presented an equal number of positive and negative outcomes.
The second part of all this is the executives. They’ll get these alternate scenarios and latch onto the one that makes the most sense from their perspective. So the exec pushing for revenue diversity will see this as an opportunity to push his vision, and (consciously or not) select the scenario that best matches his biases to point to as evidence. The exec whose mind is on competing with the WSJ will see it as an opportunity to capture some of the revenue she feels is being lost by not implementing a subscription model of some sort and select the model that best matches her worldview.
I think it’s as simplistic to assume the Times made this decision objectively and knowledgeably as it is to assume they are just all idiots. ^The actual answer is that they’re all idiots who slavishly adhere to objective standards.^
Some thoughts in response to your post, Anil.
Actually if you read the press release, it also says, “…and some of the best known voices from the news side of The Times…” Vague to be sure, but who knows what will happen going forward.
I guess I feel negatively about it because on Monday (couldn’t fit this into my post b/c it was getting too long) the Boston Globe (owned by the Times’ parent corp.) put a registration in front of all their content. So in two days I saw sites move to more restrictive models— two sites I really value, link to, and read regularly. Both are now moving out of reach for me as a blogger (linker), though maybe not as a reader. Garret Vreeland of dangerousmeta.com sums up my feeling with something he wrote the other day:
“The Economist seems to be changing their model to a subscribe-only, or Salon-ish day pass routine. Much of their content over the last couple of days went subscribe-only. A shame. They are one of my essentials; even if I bought a subscription, the inability to share their articles will be a great loss to me.”
So I think people’s responses to this announcement — mine, certainly — are bemoaning our loss of shareability, (to make up a word) and at a time when this seems to be happening to more and more sites.
As for “knee-jerk calls about how this will affect revenues,” The Times has said that advertising is profitable, but they want to diversify their revenue stream. The online component has been profitable since 2001 and continues to see increasing traffic. (I would link but now I can’t seem to find that info, but I read it within the past day or so on some site discussing all this…) So I don’t think my statement or Matt’s requires mountains of Excel number-crunching for support.
And yes, I don’t like this. I thought that was clear from my post. :) I think this move portends bad things for the web. Web 1.0 was all free when clearly some of it shouldn’t have been. Web 2.0 looks to be going in the opposite direction…
I think everybody is missing the point of the Times charging for Op-Ed. They are trying to keep people away from the website because they need to save the print publication from declining circulation. The paper makes much more money than the website and more people are reading the website and fewer the paper(an industry-wide trend).
By charging, they can deflect readers back to print, where the big bucks are. Or at least make a couple more bucks online.
Tim Porter’s blog has some good stuff about declining circulation.