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Well, if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail. Getting people to pay for a newspaper on the web is actually not a programming problem and Bloomberg do

by ugh 16y ago

Well, if you are a hammer everything looks like a nail. Getting people to pay for a newspaper on the web is actually not a programming problem and Bloomberg does not say that they spent $40-50 million on writing code. They spent that money “on the project”. I’m not claiming that they succeeded or will succeed or that $50-50 million is an appropriate amount of money for such a project. All I’m saying is that the actual technical implementation of a pay wall is by far the tiniest challenge of the project.

groks 16y ago
What are the greater challenges of the project, that account for the majority of the $50 million?
- ugh 16y ago
  I don’t know whether you have to spend a large portion of $50 million on it but market research seems like the most important part of such a project to me. Are there pay walls that work well? What design patterns do these share? Is it possible to work together or meet those who built successful pay walls? What about SEO and advertising? (The next questions are best answered with an already existing firm knowledge of the possible alternatives:) What are current and potential New York Times readers willing to pay for online content? How do they want to pay? What online services are they currently paying for and how much? Something that will (likely inevitably) also cost much is tying it all together. Meetings among high-level management are expensive but changing the business model is critical. My suggestion would be to have a small low-level independent team – preferably people who are working on the research or will be working on the implementation – come up with (very few) alternatives and to pitch those to management, limiting management’s involvement in the details. If possible the developers should probably also implement several alternatives and A/B test those. It’s pretty clear to me that actual coding is only a small part of it. (Saying that it is a “tiny” part was a bit of an exaggeration.)
- usedtolurk 16y ago
  We don't know the full scope of the project so it's impossible to tell. Other costs may have included: market research (predicting uptake pricing and income), several failed experiments, fallback plans, advertising budget, internal restructuring, redundancy payouts.

by ugh 16y ago

groks 16y ago

What are the greater challenges of the project, that account for the majority of the $50 million?

ugh 16y ago
I don’t know whether you have to spend a large portion of $50 million on it but market research seems like the most important part of such a project to me. Are there pay walls that work well? What design patterns do these share? Is it possible to work together or meet those who built successful pay walls? What about SEO and advertising? (The next questions are best answered with an already existing firm knowledge of the possible alternatives:) What are current and potential New York Times readers willing to pay for online content? How do they want to pay? What online services are they currently paying for and how much? Something that will (likely inevitably) also cost much is tying it all together. Meetings among high-level management are expensive but changing the business model is critical. My suggestion would be to have a small low-level independent team – preferably people who are working on the research or will be working on the implementation – come up with (very few) alternatives and to pitch those to management, limiting management’s involvement in the details. If possible the developers should probably also implement several alternatives and A/B test those. It’s pretty clear to me that actual coding is only a small part of it. (Saying that it is a “tiny” part was a bit of an exaggeration.)
usedtolurk 16y ago
We don't know the full scope of the project so it's impossible to tell. Other costs may have included: market research (predicting uptake pricing and income), several failed experiments, fallback plans, advertising budget, internal restructuring, redundancy payouts.