There are all sorts of corporate SEO issues that just "appear" out of nowhere if a person doesn't consider it in advance. A few examples from our site upgrade

There are all sorts of corporate SEO issues that just "appear" out of nowhere if a person doesn't consider it in advance. A few examples from our site upgrade to drupal 7... - comments permalinks were generating new identical pages under different URLs - paginated pages were getting indexed by category, by author, by month, and sitewide ... creating tons of duplicate content issues - the rel=canonical set up wasn't set up correctly either - some of the modules for things like related posts & page titles needed redone And that is just 1 small blog, whereas when you view the NYT it is likely spread across multiple submdomains, multiple CMS tools, and they likely have different directly competing business objectives for different sections. They also have a variety of inbound and outbound syndication partnerships which likely add yet more layers of complexity & yet more competing business objectives. Upgrading our site cost 10's of thousands, and that was while valuing my time at nothing. If my time was valued at market rate it likely could have been into 6 figures...and all this was doing was upgrading a few platforms to newer versions, changing the site design, and adding a new payment system. Add in the layers of complexity and bureaucracy you would see at a big slow moving corporation (and tons of money into conducting tests and research) and I am not surprised it was in the 10's of millions. I know one of our clients had a million Dollar CMS that they ended up having to scrap because of major issues with it...am not surprised that integration of a semi-porous paywall at the NYT would be pretty expensive.