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Forbes got my traffic because they didn't require me to register, log in, pay them money, or whatever it was that NYT was trying to get me to do instead of just
by Karellen 15y ago
Forbes got my traffic because they didn't require me to register, log in, pay them money, or whatever it was that NYT was trying to get me to do instead of just showing me the damn article.
- gaius 15y agoIt should be free to read, because it was free to write, right?
- Karellen 15y agoNowhere did I say I thought it should be free to read. What I am saying is that if there's some barrier to overcome before I can read a news article, I am very probably not going to read it. Especially when there's another article on the same subject, or even summarising the very article I am trying to read, which does not put any barriers in my way. I've got 40-odd news articles in my feed reader waiting for my attention. I'm just not going to spend 5 minutes figuring out how to read any particular article. That doesn't scale and I'll miss out on a whole bunch of the other 39, some of which are probably at least as interesting as the article with the barrier I've got to get past. I'm not averse to paying for content. I'm seriously considering getting a subscription to LWN.net just so I can read the paid articles a week earlier than I do now. But that's because LWN has proven over a period of many months to have a consistently high quality of reporting, and I find a huge majority of the articles interesting. I'm not sure about NYT's quality of reporting, but even if it were uniformly excellent I'm fairly sure it would contain a lot of articles I frankly don't care about, so I'd still be paying money to sort signal from chaff myself.