The New York Times Paywall & Sharing Mart
Last Wednesday we saw a brief presentation on Sharing Mart. S-Mart revolves around the idea that content trading is going to be the next stage in the evolution of the Internet.
There are many skeptics that don’t think content will ever be heavily traded on the Internet given that so much of it is free and easily accessible. Why, they ask, would people pay for content if they have access to YouTube, Spotify and Wikipedia?
If this is true, the entire newspaper industry was going to experience a slow, painful death as more and more people got their news online for free. People laughed at the NYT when they put up its “paywall” last March which required online visitors to pay to read their content.
However, the paywall seems to be working. The paywall helped the ailing newspaper turn a modest third-quarter profit this year.
This is very good news for Sharing Mart because it suggests that content doesn’t have to be free to survive online. Granted, the NYT is not “user-generated” but its 324,000 online subscribers decided to pay a monthly fee rather than heading over to Google News.
The New York Times Paywall & Sharing Mart,
Vladimir Costescu is discussing.
Vladimir Costescu 9:35 pm on October 24, 2011 Permalink |
“But what if, instead of focusing on the paywall, the NYT had focused its efforts on adding more direct value to the site itself, to (a) get more visitors to the site and (b) to keep them there longer, viewing more pages and doing more? At the same time, if they started looking at more creative, premium sponsorship/ad campaigns, I could see how they could have spent the same resources in a much more scalable growing arena, rather than having it go into a more limited paywall. That is, if they’d focused on continuing to grow traffic and creative ad campaigns, that’s something that will continue to grow. How many more subscribes will they get with the paywall? If people haven’t subscribed yet, how much more will it take to get them to subscribe, when it’s pretty clear that anyone can get around it. I have to admit I’ve never even noticed the paywall at all in all my surfing.”
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110721/19193015201/greatest-trick-nytimes-ever-pulled-was-convincing-world-its-paywall-exists.shtml