The Gray Lady’s 40 Million Dollar Folly

Posted on March 18, 2011 by bradley

Or
How, After More Than a Decade, The Times Still Doesn’t Get The Internet

Photo by Graham Biggs

After years of talk, the New York Times finally released details regarding their new pay wall yesterday. Despite receiving mixed reviews, I am failing to see how anyone could see the new Times plan as anything but a bad idea.

First, a little background. The New York Times has attempted a paywall before – and it failed miserably. So have other newspapers, and with the exception of publications that exist in specialized verticals (financials), no paywall has ever really survived. One noted paywall, the Long Island daily Newsday actually saw a mere 35 paying subscribers in its three month trial.

Granted, the new Times Paywall is less a wall and more a Byzantine collection of rules and exceptions that say if and when you can read a Times article.

Everyone gets 20 free articles a month. Links from social media sources and blogs and some search engines will be able to read the article regardless of how many other articles have been read. And readers will always have access to the front page of the site, front page of the sections and some of all the blogs and most of some of them.

Walls have it easy. The Times is putting a crap shoot and a curb between you and the content you want to read.

What’s worse is that there are so many loopholes that anyone with a passing interest in reading any article on the Times website really can. Which leaves paying for access to the website really as more of a punishment for being a less savvy internet user than something that bestows real value.

Of course, in its pricing scheme the all but admits that the website is a free bonus. How so? Well, there’s no way to buy access just to the website. You have to either pay $15 for a four week subscription to the website and the smartphone app, $20 for access to the website and the iPad app, or $35 for access to the web, smartphone and iPad app. The math behind that is crazy, but thankfully Wired already did it.

If A + B = $15 and A + C = $20 and A + B + C = $35, what does A equal?

That answer is 0.

Yes, the New York Times is saying that access to their website is essentially a giveaway value add, but you can’t have that value unless you’re a paying customer. At least not all the time. Well, you can have access when they feel like it.

Of course, nobody is saying that the Times website is worthless, least of all the advertisers. Numbers I’m seeing is that the site took in $300 million last year from ad impressions alone. But, the new pricing and access scheme concocted by the wizards at the Times feels oddly punitive especially when we consider the competitive landscape of publishing news online.

The issue facing the New York Times seems to be multifaceted, and the new paywall will do little to solve it. In fact, if the Times earns back the $40 million paywall investment within the next two years, I will be shocked.

Let’s look at the issue. First, the New York Times is not merely competing on a city or regional level. Hell, they’re not even competing on a national level. They are an international publication and they know this, as the equally vaunted and lauded paywall took effect today in Canada with the rest of world schedule to start on the 28th of this month.

Second, the New York Times is not just competing with other newspapers. News is coming from more and more spaces – all of the newspapers of the world, plus all of the television websites, the vertical websites, blogs, and the recently emerging trend of real time, unedited broadcasts from reporters on location via social networks.

Put these two together and you begin to get the picture of the modern media landscape, people have an abundance of news sources to pull from. The sea of a million periodicals allows a rapid comparing and contrasting of news that puts emphasis on loyalty to story rather than loyalty to brand.

In order to succeed online, the Times needs to stop thinking about coping with the new system while punishing those who play by the old rules and instead move to the golden rule of selling: make people want to give you money.

I know, it sounds simple. But if it were, every product would be a must have. However, since I’ve already come this far, here are just a few suggestions for how to turn the experience behind the paywall into something actually worth paying for.

First, get rid of the freaking ads. I know, newspapers have never been about selling copies and have always survived by amassing an audience and then selling that audience’s attention to advertisers. But, seriously, if I’m paying to be there, I don’t want my experience muddied up by ads.

Second, embrace your subscribers by allowing them to be heard. This is not just an argument for comments, or for restricting commenting to merely paying subscribers. This is an argument for a second commenting system that is restricted to paying customers. Reward these users by not having them mix with the aggressive and argumentative landscape of the public comments system. Allow commenters to interact with each other. And the kicker? Require your staff to participate in the premium comments.

Third, provide access. I don’t mean the current model of access which is determined on a device-by-device basis. That’s a bastardization of infinite supply. I mean real access. Access to reporters. Access to notes on an article and background information. Access to photos that were taken but not used. These are unique items that are often of scarce supply and provide a real value to readers and differentiate the Times website from the millions of others out there.

What’s more, these don’t have to all be included in one plan, they could be rolled out a la carte and at multiple levels. Level one gets you an advertising free Times experience. Level two removes adds and access to the gated community. Level three allows for communication with reporters and peels back the curtain on the story. Hell, level 15 could involve a monthly beer with the editor.

Put bluntly, the Times is selling the wrong thing. They’re trying to get people to pay for infinite and largely fungible content instead of paying for scarce commodities like access and privilege. And that is a damn foolish way to blow $40 million.

Writing for the Web – It’s a Multi-tool World

Posted on October 21, 2008 by bradley

In a recent (online for about twenty hours old at the time of this being published) article in Wired Magazine, Paul Boutin urges people to stop blogging. Why? He posits that blogging has passed through the trend phase and that it is now dominated by traditional media outlets in vague electronic disguises. The Huffington Post, the New York Times, even Fox News. These outlets have resources, they have professional writers, and most importantly, they have money. And Boutin makes a good point, check out Technorati – the top bloggers are all sloppily disguised online magazines. If you believe Boutin, your blog will get lost in the flood, overlooked by Google and readers alike. The camaraderie that once dominated the blogosphere is gone, or so says Boutin, and with it the avid reading of each others blogs and the all important act of backlinking has seemed to die with it.

Yes, the average blog has lost that “new tech smell” that saw blogs become a cottage industry so new and unknown that for what seemed like forever CNN and MSNBC would pull bloggers on air to interview them about stories. Yes, blogging has faded from the spotlight, replaced by microblogging and entrenched social networks. Yes, the major media outlets are all blogging too. But this isn’t any reason to stop.

Boutin’s suggestion was to move towards more specialized services – in particular Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube. These services, he argues, do what blogs fail to do – they allow for the easy upload and sharing of multimedia and the rapid dissemination of ideas that once escaped the blogosphere. However, Boutin has over simplified a couple of serious points. First, all of these services can easily integrate into the vast majority of blogging platforms. Second, these services are specialized to the point where they do allow for much else. Flickr allows for photos (and if you’re a heathen, video), but not much in the form of elboration on said photos other than tags and a description. Get wordy and you’ll lose the effectiveness of your photo. YouTube is in the same boat is Flickr, only it’s restricted to video. And I’ve said time and time again how I feel about comments on YouTube. Twitter? Yes, I love this service, however, its primary strength is also its greatest drawback – character length destroys the ability to elaborate. Conversations that stretch beyond a quick series of replies are a pipe dream when you have more than a handful of people whom you follow. And Facebook? It attempts to integrate all of these, and does so with marginal success. But, Facebook’s uniform atmosphere doesn’t particularly allow for any of these tasks to be done well or with any measure of originality.

Guess which one is the blog

A blog, however, allows for these various, disparate services to be combined into one highly usable, highly customizable location. YouTube videos can be embedded, allowing for them to serve either as the focal point of an argument, or for an intellectual expansion. Ditto for photos from Flickr. Twitter serves both as a means of promoting one’s blog content, but also as a means of generating new content. I, for instance, place in my last twittering near the header of my website. In this, I know I’m not alone.

Yes, being a blogger is different today than it was back in 2004. The gold rush seems to have ended. The community that was the blogosphere has largely been overrun by the likes of marketers and spammers, killing the ability to have a post instantly linked to, generating back links, and in turn, PageRank in the eyes of the almighty Google. Today, simply having a voice is not enough. Your voice must also have a message. The modern blogger is equal parts writer and marketer, and today’s bloggers are promoting themselves as a brand.

Thus, the key to building a good blog is the same as building any other good website. Know what you want to say, say it well, and then position yourself to actually be successful. Today’s web has a lot more tools at it’s disposal than it did back in the Wild West of 2004. These modern tools – social bookmarking, RSS aggregation, social news aggregation, and everyman SEO – do a lot more good for a site than they do harm. The trick is knowing how to use them.