New York Times paywall by Ken Doctor/Newsonomics
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"Initial pricing — and it’s worth noting that all of this is initial; the FT, for example, has been tweaking pricing and access rules for nine years — is $15 per four weeks (now that’s a newspaper model, eschewing what most humans call “months,” to revenue advantage) for a desktop/laptop + smartphone bundle, or $20 per four weeks for desktop + laptop + tablet or, finally, $35 per four weeks for “all digital access.” Print subscribers of any kind get digital access newly included at no extra cost.
It’s a high price, a gamble, and a big hedge — see Test 5 below — against print subscribers migrating too quickly to the tablet. Since it is not charging print subs, it’s going to be an uphill battle to get non-print people to pay a minimum of $195 a year for something that was free, and it eschews conventional wisdom that $9.95 a month is a consumer limit on many digital items. The lack of an annual offer is glaring, and makes it far less friendly to expense accounts for business readers.
Though the FT and the Wall Street Journal have long operated successful pay models, the Times’ leap is a big one: The Times isn’t mainly a business newspaper. If it can succeed charging readers for “general news,” that’s a milestone for newspapers around the world. Most fundamentally, it adds a second leg — digital circulation revenue — to the new business model for newspaper companies. Fifteen years into the Internet, they’ve proven to themselves that digital advertising money alone won’t sustain their newsrooms in the years ahead, as print continues its inevitable decline.
