New York Times Considers Monthly $5 Web-Access Fee
Bloomberg reports that the New York Times is considering charging you and me $5 per month for access to its articles on the Web.
Times Co. also asked whether subscribers would be willing to pay a discounted fee of $2.50 a month for access to the site, in the poll confirmed today by Catherine Mathis, a company spokeswoman. Nytimes.com, the most visited among newspapers’ sites, is currently free.
Times Co. is contemplating additional sources of revenue as marketers slow spending on the Internet. Ad sales at the publisher’s sites, also including about.com and boston.com, fell 8 percent and 3.5 percent in the first quarter and fourth quarter of 2008 respectively. They gained 6.5 percent last year.
Simply put: Ads don’t bring in enough revenue for the NYT. At the same time, print subscriber after print subscriber cancel their subscriptions, simply because it’s far easier – and less expensive – to read news online only.
What to make of this? Well, it is yet another sign that the NYT is struggling. It is in trouble, and everybody knows it.
As for the rather obvious question whether this should anger us (the consumers) or not: No it should not. Newspapers have to make money. It is that simple. They are businesses. They have to be financially healthy. If the NYT has to charge a fee to survive, it should do so. Besides, those who read the NYT’s website regularly can show their gratitude by paying a minor fee, wouldn’t you say? Only the sun rises for nothing.
Having said that, charging users $5 a month isn’t going to safe the New York-based newspaper. It has to cut costs as well. Its staff has to be reduced. And it has to deliver better quality products; it has become increasingly liberal in recent years, which has done tremendous damage to its reputation. If the New York Times wants to survive, its news articles – not its editorials – have to become objective once again.
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Agreed. Whereas TimesSelect insulted our intelligence — to say nothing of overestimating our interest in reading MoDo or Brooks — a $5 monthly fee for the whole thing sounds reasonable. (I still think some kind of premium price for news less than 6 hours old is worth exploring, but it’s tricky to price the market correctly, and could cause its own backlash.)
Can’t say for sure I would actually do it myself, but I think of this: I already do read the Times online, if mostly for its tech coverage. If I had to pay for it, I’d have to think about whether those articles have value to me. At $5 I think they do. It’s a little bit like the iPhone app store — most apps are in the $5/under range, and with good apps, I feel like I’m getting more than my money’s worth. The Times should take the example.
I read voraciously, utilizing many different websites, the NYT included. On balance, the NYT is less than objective in its version of the news, and too leftist in its editorials. For those reasons, the NYT website is increasingly less suitable to my tastes in news and opinion. Charging $60.00 a year for occasional access to its site would be a non-starter for me.
On the other hand, if the NYT and other producers of news and opinion formed a consortium of providers of fee for access content at an aggregate cost of $60.00 per year, I would readily consider a subscription.
$60.00 a year for internet access doesn’t really sound like much, but since there are millions and millions of internet readers (and potential subscribers), the income from such a consortium would be far greater than the aggregate cost of producing and distributing a print version of newspapers to a shrinking number of subscribers.
Will readers pay? I doubt it. There are too many free sources of news, without the helping of big-city liberal bias. The NYT increased their web readership in a big way when they went free. Now they’ll see their influence fall again.