When I wrote about the success of the NYT paywall last month, I got a lot of pushback in the comments and on Twitter. Here’s a sample:
“The fact people pay speaks more people’s average techno-illiteracy/laziness about how to change a link address in their browser than anything else.”“Add ?ref=fb to the base link of any NYT article and the paywall drops, and Felix thinks this is “working”? Huh?”
“After seeing how many ways you can get by the pay “wall” I would say it isn’t working at all.”
But of course the paywall is working—with the emphasis very much on the “pay” rather than on the “wall”.
Yes, the NYT paywall is porous—but that’s a feature, not a bug. It allows anybody, anywhere, to read any NYT article they like. That makes the NYT open and inviting—and means that I continue to be very happy to link to NYT stories. (If you follow a link to the NYT from this or any other blog, you’ll never hit the paywall.)
I’m in England right now, home to both of the sights above: the polite request to “please keep off the grass”, accompanied by tiny iron hoops; and the forbidding walls surrounding the gardens of Buckingham Palace. The former encapsulates everything which people like about England; the latter is the dark and regrettable side of things.
Now imagine that both of the gardens above were open to anybody paying an annual membership fee. The gardens on the left would have many more freeloaders—people who just saunter onto the grass and enjoy the sunshine without paying. The ones on the right would be much more effective in keeping such people out.
But here’s the thing about freeloaders: if they value what they’re getting, a lot of them will end up paying anyway. What happened when the Indianapolis Museum of Art moved to a free-admission policy? Its paid membership increased by 3%. When the Minneapolis Institute of Arts did the same thing, paid membership increased by 33%.
Sales people and business-side executes tend to believe as a matter of faith that if people can get something for free, they won’t pay for it. But all they need to do is look at their own behavior to see how that isn’t true: when they go to a restaurant in a distant town that they’ll never visit again, they still leave a 20% tip. A large segment of the population feels that it’s only proper to pay for something if you’re getting value from it—and if you invite as many people as possible onto your lawn, that’s a great way of maximizing the number of people who get value from it. Especially in a world where your own enjoyment of it doesn’t impinge on anybody else’s.
The fact is that no one subscribes to the WSJ or the FT because of their exclusivity. As a result, the smart thing for both papers to do is to maximize their paying readership by maximizing their overall readership. Instead, both have taken a scared and defensive approach to digital subscriptions, fearing that if their readers can get their content for free, then they won’t pay.
Wonderfully, the NYT seems to have disproved that idea. It’s no philanthropy: it’s a publicly-listed for-profit corporation, run for the financial benefit of its shareholders. But its paywall marks a new model and very promising in getting consumers to pay for content. It’s not a completely free pay-as-you-wish approach: the NYT nudges people quite hard to pay quite a lot of money. But I’d wager that the majority of people buying digital-only subscriptions to the NYT are doing so only after bypassing the paywall at least once or twice. If you hit the paywall on a regular basis and barge past it, eventually you start feeling a bit guilty and pay up. By contrast, if you hit the FT or WSJ paywall and can’t get past it, you simply go away and feel disappointed in your experience.
Don't be ridiculous, all these papers are giving away some proportion of their content for free, so that readers can try before they buy. With the WSJ, 20-30% of the content is always free and the rest you can often access by googling the headline. wsj.com is my daily news source and I have never paid them anything for it. For you to paint them in stark terms simply because their porous paywall isn't as porous as you would like it to be is just silly. As for me, I have never paid for any of these sites as long as they force me to subsidize content that I don't want, just like the first young reader you quoted. That means allowing me to pay by the article, so I pay for what I actually use, not for other worthless content that they choose to run also. The fact that all these papers are too dumb to put in such a simple and clearly superior model is why they will be out of business within a decade.
#1 Posted by Ajay, CJR on Tue 16 Aug 2011 at 05:39 PM
What you also haven't mentioned here is that the WSJ and FT offer primarily financial news. They're aimed at a pretty specific audience with a close connection between having the information and making money (e.g. they compete to break stories on M&A etc). They also accept that their content will only ever be relevant to a pretty small sector of the general population. But the NYT covers general news and invites people in for reasons of pleasure and general knowledge, less connected with their work, so it's a different business model to start with.
#2 Posted by Judith Evans, CJR on Wed 17 Aug 2011 at 03:44 AM