4 ms·

The metered paywall seems like a decent approach though. You can view X articles for free in a month. So if you just occasionally land on an article, you don't

• snogglethorpe 14y ago
  The problem is that paywall pricing is often wonky. The NYT, for instance lets you read 20 articles per month for free. But wanna read 21? $15/month ($180/year). [In reality, of course, it's trivial to get past the NYT's paywall, but that's not really relevant.] If you read, say, 50 articles per month, that's about $0.50 per article ($15 for the 30 articles over your 20 free ones), which for most articles, even in a quality paper, is way too much. I guess the papers basically reason that it's like a paper subscription but a bit less... but that doesn't really reflect the way people read papers electronically. When you buy a physical paper, you often read a lot of it, and it serves as a major part of your news. You feel like you got a pretty good value from your investment (and the physical medium aids that feeling, even if it's a waste). But people get news on the internet from tons of different sources, and the value of any one paper is a lot less, even if you like it a lot. I value papers like the NYT because they actually do a lot of important things (e.g. sending reporters into war zones, and doing deep investigative journalism), but the gut feeling of "value" for their digital subscriptions simply isn't there in the same way it was for the physical paper.