The Emperor's New Paywall
from the that's-not-a-paywall dept
We’ve already covered just how easy it is to get around the NY Times’ $40 million paywall. NYT management is clearly lying when it claims that most people won’t bypass the wall, when it’s so incredibly easy to bypass… even by accident. With the DailyCaller listing out five more ways to bypass the paywall (not even counting things like the bookmarklet or turning off javascript) such as “removing ‘?gwh=numbers’ from an article’s URL,” it’s finally occurred to me:
This is the Emperor’s New Paywall.
The NY Times isn’t robed in a paywall at all. It’s naked and simply wants people to believe it has a paywall, in the hope that some people will pay and that the masses won’t call them on it. Except unlike the Emperor in the fairy tale, you have to believe that the NYT management must recognize this, and is simply playing stupid in its interactions talking about this. It really seems to think that by playing stupid and pretending it really has a paywall, which is truly just a voluntary donation program, it will make people more likely to pay. And I’m sure some people will pay, but I can’t believe the numbers will be enough to move the needle. The thing that I still can’t understand is how it could spend all this time and money preparing for this and not add a single bit of additional value in this scheme. You would think that during those 14 months someone might have come up with a plan to add more value that was worth paying for, but it seems that they didn’t even consider that as a worthwhile option.
Filed Under: business models, paywall
Companies: ny times
Comments on “The Emperor's New Paywall”
Dammit Mike!!
Has this made anyone else imagine Rupert Murdoch naked? Can somebody please pass me the mind-bleach when they’re done with it? Ugh.
Re: Re:
Rupe doesn’t own NYT…didn’t think about it until you brought it up. Thanks.
Business Model = Pay what you want!
So they are effectively setting an empty guitar case on the ground hoping for passers-by to drop a coin or two. Who would have thought they would follow Radiohead’s model?
Eh, this topic is kind of played out. Can we just wait until someone figures out how many subscribers / people actually pay and then giggle some more?
Place your bets, the answer is somewhere around:
10,000 (Kindle Subscribers) + (Your bet here) + 1 (that AC that keeps posting how this is a good idea)
Re: Re:
No one is going to bet unless you offer some sort of reward.
$40 Million Paywall
How do I get a job designing firewalls for the NYT?
Re: $40 Million Paywall
Apparently you don’t have to be qualifed to get the job so it should be pretty easy.
No value added
The telling thing to me is that with all of that investment they have not added anything new that is of value to the subscriber.
Microsoft did that and called it Windows Vista. Everything they added was something that either MS itself wanted or one of its business parters wanted. They made it prettier, but otherwise added nothing of value to customers. When you think you have a monopoly or guaranteed audience you lose focus on producing things that your customers want. Instead you just think up ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
The problem that the NYT only thinks it has a guaranteed market.
Hmm
Maybe we’re all looking at this wrong – maybe it’s not actually a paywall, it’s just a really poorly advertised scheme for soliciting donations.
That’s pretty much the only explanation I can come up with…
Re: Hmm
See, after reading this, I thought of 2 things…
1. this is an attempt at ‘pay what you want’…meaning it’s putting a way to pay, but not specifcially blocking the easy ways to get around it. Instead of coming out and SAYING it’s pay what you want….(ish)…..abd thus looking like they are giving up on the old draconic business models.
2. They are gathering a list of people that get around the paywall to do some massive lump lawsuit for stealing content. At very least, they are gathering stats for numbers for a study to justify why copyright laws need to be more draconic.
This scheme works similar to spam. The only reason spam still exists is because it catches enough numbnuts to make it a profitable business.
TD = NYTpaywallbitchfest.com
Re: Re:
Speaking of bitches . . . .
Re: Re:
FUD robot phone home.
Re: Re:
Yawn.
Re: Re:
Really? I thought TD=PiratingFreetardKoolaidfest.
Re: Re:
So what?
40 Mill!
Oh Man,
I knew the paywall was misguided, but they spent that much on it? OMG. I’m a web developer, and I could have set up something that doesn’t work for MUCH less than that!
They are truly clueless. I’m trying to imagine how mental the boardroom meetings must be.
“hey, my statistics [that I pulled out of some bodypart] tell me that 97% of people won’t know how to get around our paywall”.
“great, so that’s 5 million bucks per week, and our paper is rescued!”.
“and we have nobody on staff who really understands the web, but this guy I just paid 3 million to said that everything’s going to be fine”
“uh, yeah, but the geezers that don’t understand technology or how to get around the paywall might also just want to keep the actual physical paper and not pay for this”.
“we don’t like that kind of negativity in our company, Bob”
Re: 40 Mill!
“I knew the paywall was misguided, but they spent that much on it? OMG. I’m a web developer, and I could have set up something that doesn’t work for MUCH less than that!”
Hell, I could set up something that is easier to get around and cost MORE. If they’re willing to pay $40 million for what they got, I’m sure I could sell them a paywall (for about $50 million or so) that turns itself off.
Re: 40 Mill!
but they spent that much on it?
they said they spent that much on it.
maybe they spent $100 to get some intern to write it, stuck $40 mil into the offshore accounts of the senior management and are waiting for the paper to go down in flames so they can retire in style. all the while they will be blaming “teh haxorz” for destroying an american institution.
Added Value
No added value? Who are you kidding. Take a look and most of the online newspapers in the country and then compare them to the NYT. They don’t hold a candle to it.
Re: Added Value
I marked your comment funny, because other publications that are not putting up paywalls do hold a candle to the NY Times, and because “added value” is value that entices people to pay for something that used to be free. The NY Times has done nothing to their offering besides adding a paywall. Hence, no added value to entice us to pay for what we could (and still can) get for free. You either knew that and were making a joke, or else the joke is on you and the NY Times.
Re: Added Value
>>No added value? Who are you kidding. Take a look and most of the online newspapers in the country and then compare them to the NYT. They don’t hold a candle to it.
Correct. No ADDED value. It is already a great paper. But I haven’t seen anything that says a penny of the $40 million is going to do anything that makes it better. In a competitive market like news, if you are not getting better you are getting worse.
Re: Added Value
added
You use this word . . . I do not think it means what you think it means . . .
Let’s say you have a pile of gold. That’s pretty valuable, right? Now let’s say you pay $40 million to pour raw sewage all over that gold. When someone else points out that this seems like a colossal waste of cash without adding anything of value to your pile, do you respond with “No added value?? It’s gold!”
I think you are on to something...
I think you have figured it out. They know what would happen if they threw a paywall up instantly. Traffic would drop to near zero compared to current levels. This is maybe their way of soliciting donations or maybe even a test. If enough people sign up, they can erect the real pay wall.
Close to Naked..
http://newstechnica.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/rupert-murdoch-gollum.jpg
I’ve been reading the stories here about the paywall, so I decided to go see it myself. Apparently I have accidentally messed something up and cannot get to the paywall no matter how many stories I click on.
Re: Re:
>>I’ve been reading the stories here about the paywall, so I decided to go see it myself. Apparently I have accidentally messed something up and cannot get to the paywall no matter how many stories I click on.
Right now the paywall is only active in Canada. If you want to check it out you can bounce your request off a Canadian proxy server.
Re: Re: Re:
Right now the paywall is only active in Canada. If you want to check it out you can bounce your request off a Canadian proxy server
Nope. Launched in the US on Monday…
target market
is as follows
affluent,
guilty,
and web-challenged
still fairly sizeable, perhaps even big enough to recoup the 40mil.
imho, the ease the metering and walling crumbles tells me they are not betting the entire farm on this strategy.
How is your paywall going mike ????
how is your PAYWALL going mike ?????
you know your “crystal ball”… which of course is a PAYWALL..
But you call it another name,, so you can get your money and profit from your paywall..
and all your stupid plebs cant work it out….
Re: How is your paywall going mike ????
Welcome back Darryl. How did first grade go?
Re: How is your paywall going mike ????
Right, we need dumb morons like you to explain it to us.
Re: How is your paywall going mike ????
Hi Darryl,
You don’t know me, but I have a question for you. Why do you insist on using irregular capitalisation and random punctuation throughout all of your posts?
It makes reading your comments much more difficult than need be.
Thanks.
Re: Re: How is your paywall going mike ????
It’s called “persona management”. Some software gives his posts typographical idiosyncracies so that we’ll all think “darryl” is different from “Darryl” is different from “Anonymous Coward with good grammar, and a fetish for consulting lawyers”.
It's a question of price
I read the NY Times quite often and enjoy it as one of my news sources along with BBC Reuters the Washington Post and (recently) Al Jazeera, and sohave no problem paying a small amount for doing so with ease.
$35 a month is way way too high in my opinion. When I found out you could get full digital subscription by subscribing the Weekend Book Review for $1.75 a week I signed up. That’s about $7.50 a month, which is more reasonable (the right price, I’d say, would be $4.99 a month)
They since seem to have disabled the link, but you might still be able to get a subscription.
As for hacks, the easiest way of all I found was to go to nytimes.com and then instead of clicking on links, do a right-click-copy-link-open-new-window-paste. No ?args. No paywall.
Even so that’s a pain and I chose the $7.50 a month instead.
I donate $1 + a month to you, Mike, and they write many more stories than you do.
Making it a highly porous barrier may turn out to be a fair compromise. Traffic will tell.
One item related to the NYT paywall stories that people seem to be missing completely… the un-freakn-believably-godlike marketing ability of the people who sold this.
The marketing/sales team behind the “sure we can make a kick arse paywall for you” are obviously some of the best con artists on the planet.
I challenge anyone to get a $40 million deal approved and passed by a major company for “months of research, innovation, and development” that results in an inanely simple java script.
This paywall stupidity is nothing save a resounding testament to the power and influence of the marketing team behind it. I’d hire the entire team in a heart beat and begin making massive capital gains for essentially no work, GENIUS!!!!
And then a little boy asked “Why is that man wearing no clothes?”
His mother quickly shushed him, but it was too late. Everyone around the boy recognized that the boy was a dishonest fool, and he was shunned and ostracised, because everyone realises that he was a freetard, wanting to live in a wild west where he could freely steal cars and rape people, because everyone knows that copyright protection for over a century is the first, last, and only defense agaisnt a Hobbesian state of nature.
I cant wait for some more user backlash to appear on this. If I was tricked into paying for something that is free to anyone clever enough to get around this paywall i’d be pretty pissed off and i’d sure be demanding my money back. You cant expect to treat each customer differently and not have some of them feel like theyre getting screwed
Weird pricing structure
Comment #24 talks about the Book Review, which is even better than what I discovered – at least, for those willing to pay the NYT something…
The basic online sub (no print) is $3.75/week. Their weekday print sub is $3.70/week, which includes full online access (worth more than the basic online access). And, their Sunday print sub is $3.75/week, which also includes online.
I’ve asked the NYT why this is, so if they respond, I will update y’all.
(And, yes – the price is way too high, even if the NYT’s shit don’t stink.)
– D
Re: Weird pricing structure
(“Replying” to myself – actually just an update.)
I have had NO RESPONSE from the NYTimes. Hardly a surprise, I s’pose, considering the apparent failure of their brilliant scheme. Rather a shame, since I have the utmost respect for the paper. Ah well.
– D
They can pay me $40M to do not a goddamn thing and have the expense to put on the books,
We don't need no stinking added value
I’m guessing they believe their stuff is already so valuable people will be willing to pay for it, so it didn’t occur to them they need to add value. Just guessing though.