The New York Times has finally (see Public Editor Arthur Brisbane’s critique here) gotten around to covering its impending Web site paywall.
Friday Page One:
Times Rolls Out Its Pay Design For Web Users
The New York Times introduced a plan on Thursday to begin charging the most frequent users of its Web site $15 for a four-week subscription in a bet that readers will pay for news they are accustomed to getting free.
Beginning March 28, visitors to NYTimes.com will be able to read 20 articles a month without paying, a limit that company executives said was intended to draw in subscription revenue from the most loyal readers while not driving away the casual visitors who make up the vast majority of the site’s traffic.
Right – soak your best customers while drive-by readers get to freeload.
That’s newsonomics in the digital age.
(For a smart summary of the news world order, check out this Nieman Journalism Lab analysis.)
For a more pedestrian summary, back to the Times:
The Times’s announcement prompted more than 2,500 comments to its Web site.
A reader in Los Angeles wrote, “The price is too high. I just cannot afford it. I will go to BBC.com or cnn.com. Sorry, NYT, you picked the wealthy again.”
That comment prompted Lori K from Boston to respond, “The ‘wealthy?’ It’s two lunches at McDonalds. For a month of reporting. I’m happy to support the NYT for such a low price.”
You rock, Lori.
Campaign Outsider 
Sir: I think it’s too expensive. The price point is too high for people who’re used to getting it for free. I have been thinking a lot about this and my guess is that they’ve probably done some kind of research that shows a dropoff in readership beyond x articles and tried to come up with the best compromise.
But it just seems so counterintuitive. First of all, why should print subscribers get free web versions and mobile subscribers get nothing? Secondly, why aren’t they offering a cheaper subscription price? I can understand that if you want to read your 21st article, you can pay 15 bucks and get unlimited access for the next month. But it don’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a regular subscriber who keeps on paying every month for online access should get a break.
Make them pay eight bucks, or nine bucks. (I’m thinking of $10 as a psychological barrier but I’m sure there’s data on what that magic number is.) A steady monthly income of nine dollars is better than a one-time fifteen dollar purchaser.
And the weirdest thing is, they do this already with their print edition, where you can get the weekly paper for around $3/week, weekly + weekend for $7/week and so on. Also: you can just subscribe to the weekly edition for around $12/month and get unlimited online access. You can just throw the physical paper away. (That’s what I did when I subscribed to the WSJ. I can’t afford multiple subscriptions so now I get the New Yorker.)
I feel like NYT should have become an invisible cost. Fifteen bucks a month is not an invisible cost. Fifteen bucks can buy two lunches at McDonald’s (or a squash, a tiny broccoli, a sliver of piave and a chicken breast at Whole Foods), but digital media is cheap. Big Macs and oranges dude. Digitally, fifteen bucks can get me Kind of Blue AND Lolita. So?
This was the New York Times’ big chance to actually be proactive instead of reactive to market forces, but instead they’re doing the kind of thing that may have worked if they’d done it a good few years ago, except people would probably have laughed then too.
Oh wait, they did.
Good points all, Arafat. But the bottom line is still: Suck it up, Buttercup.
Oh god, I was wrong. It’s actually thirty five dollars for a month’s access on various devices. ALLAH. It’s even worse than I thought.