Monday, February 09, 2009

How the New York Times could profit for selling online for $1 a month

Over at Poynter Online, Jim Romenesko is looking at the business model for the New York Times a paper which he describes as

daily miracle of fresh, smart, crucially important content.
which is worth saving beacause

saving it can become a model for saving other quality journalism.


And now he adds

the Times has done so much so well to build its online offerings it's time to turn the dynamics around -- by getting paid for that content, while using the Internet to eliminate the huge costs of producing and delivering it. The Internet should be a publisher's dream, not nightmare.


So here is the model

Charge its 20m unique monthly visitors a $1 a month which would produce $240m in new annual income.

Of course it misses a point that a payroll not matter how samll would probably turn away many of those unique visitors but he gets around this by planning the following

1.To help preserve the Times' search results, the headline and first paragraph of each article will appear online (and on mobile and other electronic devices) for free.

2.All online articles will cost 10 cents each to read in full, with simple, one-step purchases powered by an I-Tunes-like Journalism infrastructure.

Would it work.Well read the full content for a more detailed explaination but I wonder how much a paywall would put the barriers up for the general browser.

Nevertheless an interesting proposition?

1 comment:

Richard Kendall said...

Maybe for something like the NYT, a big, respected news publisher, but this would have less of a pull for smaller news titles.

Personally I like to browse a little randomly sometimes, if this model was taken up by too many, then it would hinder hopping round sites as you'd have to stop and choose to buy-in.

I like the thinking, small costs to user add up to decent funds for publisher, but am not sure this would work for many titles?