Will the NY Times’ new payment scheme work
Jan 19, 2010 in Media
There’s speculation flying that the New York Times will soon have a new payment scheme. New York magazine broke the story over the weekend that the most likely scheme is a metered system not unlike the Financial Times, where a reader gets access to a number of pieces and then be asked to subscribe.
One personal friend of Sulzberger said a final decision could come within days, and a senior newsroom source agreed, adding that the plan could be announced in a matter of weeks. (Apple’s tablet computer is rumored to launch on January 27, and sources speculate that Sulzberger will strike a content partnership for the new device, which could dovetail with the paid strategy.) It will likely be months before the Times actually begins to charge for content, perhaps sometime this spring.
The New York magazine piece is full of speculation and Gawker calls bullshit on most of it but if it’s remotely accurate it seems that the payment scheme is an attempt to get the best of both worlds: wide online reach AND cash from frequent subscribers.
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times‘ online reach.