Fred Wilson has nice things to say about my analysis of the NYT paywall—thanks, Fred!—but it’s worth teasing out one area where he and I might differ.
Fred says that the NYT “went with the FT’s model”, and I’ve also heard privately from another person making an impassioned case that the NYT and FT models are basically the same.
But they’re not.
The NYT paywall is so porous that it can be considered to be a genuinely freemium model. If you follow a link to the NYT site, you will never run into the paywall—no matter how many times you do so or how many NYT articles you’ve read that month. If you then want to stay on the NYT site and read other stories there, it’s very easy to do that too: the paywall might appear, but it’s easy to circumvent. (One popular way of doing this: just strip off the extra garbage in the URL which summons the paywall.)
That’s why I likened the NYT paywall to a polite “please keep off the grass” sign, with symbolic low green hoops separating would-be readers from their desired content. If they want to get there, it’s easy to do so; the NYT is just making it clear to them that it would like them to pay for a subscription first. Being both polite and reasonably wealthy, it turns out that hundreds of thousands of nytimes.com readers have done just that.
At the FT, by contrast, the paywall was much less porous from day one, and has been tightened up substantially since then. In fact, with the exception of Google’s First Click Free program, the FT has deliberately made it as hard as it possibly can for non-subscribers to read its content.
The difference between the NYT and the FT, then, is that the porousness of the paywall is a feature at the NYT and a bug at the FT. Yes, both of them have an official meter which counts how many stories you’re allowed to read before the paywall gets thrown up. That’s the crack-dealer model of selling content: give ‘em a little for free, and soon they’ll be begging for more. The free stories you read before the paywall goes up aren’t a porous paywall, they’re an integral part of the whole paywall model.
Put the question this way: when it comes to paywalls, is the FT more like the NYT, or is it more like the WSJ? The WSJ doesn’t have a meter; it has a more old-fashioned system where some articles are free to everybody and others sit behind the wall.
But I’m more interested in how forbidding the wall is, rather than in where and how exactly it’s placed. Both the FT and the WSJ are signed up for First Click Free, which means that both of them are susceptible to the elaborate workaround of copying the headline, pasting it into Google News, and then clicking through from there. Beyond that, both of them basically make it as hard as possible for non-subscribers to read stories behind the wall.
If I link to a WSJ or FT article, I can have no assurance that my readers will be able to read it. The same is true with respect to sharing that article on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or even LinkedIn. (The exception is Google Plus, since First Click Free is in effect there.) More generally, if a non-subscriber wants to read a specific story behind the WSJ or FT paywall, it’s very hard for them to do so, compared to the NYT site, where it’s much easier.
That’s why I like the NYT paywall and lump the WSJ and FT paywalls together. Whether there’s a meter or not is pretty much irrelevant, especially considering the way in which the FT has steadily tightened up its meter to the point at which non-subscribers can barely read anything at all. Even subscribers, like myself, find it very hard to read FT content a lot of the time: try following a Twitter link to an FT story on your mobile device, or trying to read an FT story in Flipboard, and you’ll see what I mean.
Felix, Your report is sound to the extent that it is. But it is not on a fairly fundamental issue: the weakness of both the Sunday NYT and the Saturday FT this week. It staggered me reading the feeble-minded column on rating agencies in the weekend FT, about the only effort in it worth looking at. Askance.
Despite the fact that I find The NYT Public Editor to be far and away the best ombuds in the English-language press, I do not like the uneven nature of The NYT. It is like The New Yorker: some overpoweringly good coverage, dominated by acres of mediocrity. Meaning that often you will see an entire issue of the paper with virtually nothing in it, as in yesterday's.
Except for the Murdoch Sunday Times, having a subtle force probably not susceptible to analysis, the major weekend papers are under-performing ones. Murdoch apparently was excited by Review in the weekend WSJ, but it is tedious. The same inept columnists going around in tight little circles. Why doesn't he commission hard news book reviews? The Waste Land would be an excellent subject, with its iPad app and Yale annotations. How is this text being taught at Columbia and Harvard? What does it tell us about The Fever Land we inhabit?
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 03:12 PM
Felix: The subtext is what we need to understand. I agree with you that The NYT is treating its readers well. What we have to master is how to hard-wire information collation into university studies (going back to high school), including in journalism schools. Here is a brilliant example:
Whither the M&A scoop? Felix Salmon AUG 15, 2011 09:04 EDT
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AUG 15, 2011 10:38 AM EDT
Yeah, but this is going to blow your mind…unwiredview.com’s Staska actually predicted this very possibility last Thursday:http://goo.gl/SZSP8
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Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 August 2011 13.07 BST
We have to make the foundation firm: in the COBUILD English Grammar, there is an excellent introduction to cohesion. This book should be the official American grammar. It should be official for CJR. Why can't we get this work done?
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 03:36 PM
As a suggestion for CJR/Audit housekeeping, it might have been mentioned that the post prior to this one ran late last week over on the Reuters blog where it so happens there was some fairly verbose commenting on the NYT paywall.
It's also curious that in the comparisons of the WSJ and FT hard paywalls to the NYT soft paywall, there is no mention of the fact that both the WSJ and FT are primarily financial publications which put them in something of an apples position to that of the NYT orange. A more direct guage might have been that of the NYT to the Times of London or News Corp's other tablet-based effort The Daily. I'm pointing this out because what seems to be going on in the realm of paywalls is that specialized publications such as financials seem to be a better prospect for a paywall than general news. Another seeming vertical, although to a somewhat lesser extent, is sports.
Yet another factor missing is that in the run-up to the NYT's paywall launch there was some discussion about the impact on core readership. If memory serves, available industry-wide studies at the time were showing rough numbers indicating that less than 20 percent of readers were generating more than 80 percent of page views. What the NYT's metered approach meant was that those who were most likely to generate the most ad revenue were also the ones who would need to pay for a subscription. It was a counter-intuitive idea.
#3 Posted by Perry Gaskill, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 04:58 PM
Hi Perry.
It could probably be more visible, but we mention in Felix's bio up top that his stuff also runs on Reuters.com. This way we don't have to keep remembering to add it to his posts.
#4 Posted by Dean Starkman, CJR on Mon 15 Aug 2011 at 05:26 PM