N.Y. Times Mulling $5 Monthly Fee for Online Access

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on July 10, 2009 - 10:42am.

New York - The New York Times (NYSE: NYT) is considering charging a $5 monthly fee for online access to its content, with a discounted fee of $2.50 for print subscribers, Bloomberg reported. The company said in a survey of its print subscribers that it is "considering charging a monthly fee of $5.00 to access its content, including all its articles, blogs and multimedia," and asked whether they'd be willing to pay a discounted fee for online access.

The company previously experimented with putting its editorial page content behind a subscription firewall with its Times Select service, but shuttered that service after two years.

"The question here for consumers is the psychological barrier of now paying when you were getting it for free before, and you're going to lose some readers as a result," Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell Inc., told Bloomberg.

Related Links:
http://snipurl.com/mixds (Bloomberg)

Published in DMW Daily, July 10, 2009

Previous story: Congressman Urges Antitrust Veto of Live Nation-Ticketmaster
Next story: N.Y. AG Sues Tagged Social Network Over 'Fraudulent' Emails

Email this page

tags: Advertising | Newspapers | Publishing | The New York Times |

Comments

Paid Content on NYT

Submitted by KMB (not verified) on July 23, 2009 - 2:32am.

"The question here for consumers is the psychological barrier of now paying when you were getting it for free before, and you're going to lose some readers as a result," Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell Inc., told Bloomberg. Well...yeah! Explain to people why what was once valued at $0 is now valued at $5. We are now well into a second generation of consumers who associate the web with free and instant content. Seems to me that consumers have no issue paying for access to the networks that provide content or an interactive experience (ala monthly ISP fees, monthly cable fees, monthly cell phone fees) but now add to that paying for morsels of content....doesn't fly. And that's what newspapers need to figure out. Stop shoe-horning old business models into new ones, get creative and come up with a new value prop.