New York Times to charge for access?
Post by Matt Proctor
Mashable reports that the popular news site will start using a fee-based system. NYMag.com explains that the Times is looking into three types of pay strategies:
One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only… Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges
It could be argued that the New York Times is one of the remaining “old media” papers which has managed to make it on-line without needing to charge for content. The website has some of the largest traffic of any English-news website, attracting visitors from not only the local NY area but from all over the world. Charging users for content would reduce the number of visitors and overall ad revenue. A paid service called TimesSelect was ended by the company in 2007 after it met widespread criticism. Tom Friedman, a multiple-Pulitzer prize winning columnist for the Times, explained how the paid service meant readers in East Asia lost out:
As we got into it, it was clear to me I was getting cut off from a lot of my readers in India and China where 50 dollars per year would be equal to a quarter of college tuition. I used to read you before you went behind the wall.
However, charging for stories would probably raise more revenue than advertising, leaving the company with a difficult decision to make: to leave the service completely free and lose money, to charge all users and make a profit but lose readers or to only charge high-volume users, as WSJ does at the moment.
What do you think? Should old-media news outlets charge for content, possibly allowing for more innovation or should they continue to struggle with little money coming in from advertising? Leave your comments below!
