My email today included a thoughtful offer from Lincoln, the luxury car maker: “Dear NYTimes.com reader, As a frequent reader of NYTimes.com … [you’re] just the kind of person we at Lincoln want to engage. … Though NYTimes.com will soon begin charging for unlimited access, Lincoln is offering you a free digital subscription for the remainder of 2011”.
Apparently the New York Times has identified its wealthier Web site registrants (my zip code puts me solidly in Millionaires for Obama territory, plus they may have merged their user database with additional demographic data) and sold them off to companies such as Lincoln who will now offer relief from the $180/year being charged to poor readers whose page views aren’t worth enough to justify the wear and tear on the servers.
So the newspaper whose editorial board complains that rich people don’t pay high enough taxes will be giving away its content for free to the wealthy while hitting the lower middle class for what might be 10 percent of their disposable income.
Now that I won’t have to pay for the New York Times, perhaps it is time to consider buying that $60,000 Lincoln Navigator that I’ve always wanted.
Not very scientific philg. Maybe it’s more interesting, maybe they sold the whole first year to lincoln? Maybe the second year too? Maybe for everyone, not just you. Nice way to admit defeat without admitting it. Just a thought.
Here’s a good link on how the NYT subscription plan is vastly overpriced when compared to other online subscription models.
http://theunderstatement.com/post/4019228737/digital-subscription-prices-visualized-aka-the-new
I’ve.heard plenty of complaints of the new costs of NY Times web site that I simply don’t understand. If you buy a newspaper or magazine, you have to pay for it. You don’t simply walk up to a newsstand and grab a copy for free. The printed version contains ads too. Cost of printing and distributing is only part of the price. Similarly, web sites also have production costs. So why can’t the NY Times charge for the online version? They’ve never been a paper for free for the great unwashed. And if their advertisers want to subsidize the content to reach a certain demographic, what’s wrong with that? The Times gets criticized for being too left leaning and for being market driven at the same time.
Signed, Paid subscriber since ’98.
Dave Winer: Good point that I don’t know what other readers were offered. That’s one good reason to post this in my Weblog. Others can comment on whether or not they were offered the Lincoln deal.
Matt: Thanks for the link to the chart. I earlier noted that the nytimes was priced higher than the WSJ. I don’t see how that could ever work, but maybe the plan is to have a super high list price and then discount to $0-5/month for everyone.
David Wihl: I’m not complaining that the cost is too high (though I won’t pay any price higher than $0; my emotional and professional life would be improved if I did not waste time reading the news), just pointing out the irony! (As an author, I do like it when I can get paid for my work, but one reason that I make books such as http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/ available free on the Web is that I think that there are plenty of interested readers, e.g., in India, China, and Africa, from whom it would be impractical to extract any money.) Why is it ironic? As far as I know, the Wall Street Journal does not give away the paper for free to rich people, nor charge the poor a higher annual fee than they charge the rich. Yet the WSJ is associated with plutocracy.
I also received the offer, but my zip code puts me in rural georgia. I would say that your physical location may have less to do with it then you think.
bill
I live in a fairly affluent town and received the offer as well. I was curious about it and found a WSJ article with some details. Notably, they “targeted 200,000 heavy readers of the newspaper’s website,” expect the promotion to yield “around 100,000 digital subscribers,” and see this as a way to “appeal to ‘thought leaders’ in a younger-age bracket.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110322-711811.html
George: Thanks for the explanation. If 47 years old (70% dead?) qualifies me as “younger-age”, I guess I should feel flattered. I wonder if the fact that I was recently surfing around car shopping sites also helped (I bought a Honda Odyssey).
This is nothing new. As a lawyer with a home in a “rich” ZIP code whose attention to ads is desired by advertisers of luxury products (hey, I didn’t get to live here by wasting my money on luxury), I regularly get offers from publications like the New Yorker, TIME, and others to basically give me the mag for the cost of mailing. The NYT, which I subscribed to until a year ago, has always had a double identity, illustrated a) on the one hand by its Fashion sections ($2,000 for a wear-once-and-then-throw-away dress) and its “Vows” section, where the people who traditionally get its attention are the “select,” the “elect,” and the “elite,” and, b) on the other hand, by its “limousine liberal” approach to politics. But at least they seem to “care,” editorially speaking, for those who aren’t the targets of their advertisers.
As a Social Security recipient living on that SS in the poor part of one of the richer towns in the LA area who hasn’t owned a car in 30 years, I wonder how I qualified? Perhaps because I clicked through from Dave Winer’s linkblog feed?
I am probably one of the heavy readers of their website though.
I received the Lincoln offer as well. But my dad didn’t. He is an even more “loyal” reader than I am, lives in much more affluent ZIP code, continually receives junk snail mail for luxury goods (which immediately go into the recycle bin), and has a higher net worth than I do. Maybe Paul Smurl, the Infallible MBA/JD Executive in charge of the paywall (who is currently taking questions about it) is as inept at marketing intelligence as he is at creating a comprehensible pricing scheme. (By the way, today he dodged a question about the business model in the appropriate MBA/JD fashion: “The plan we are implementing allows us to develop a new source of revenue that will support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation, while enabling us to maintain the large audience that supports our robust advertising business.”)
In my case, accepting the offer (which has no catch that I could determine) merely buys time to see how the Times’ paywall scheme plays out over the next nine months. I would certainly be willing to pay a reasonable price for digital access to the Times Web site; and I did subscribe to “Times Select” during its brief existence. But I consider the price they set this time unreasonable, and would not pay it. Combined with the the absurdly convoluted device-based tiered pricing structure, I believe that many “loyal” readers will reject the new scheme. The Lincoln offer may well be a ploy to delay the erosion of their visitor numbers for advertisers, and a tacit admission that many of those “eyeballs” would not accept the new pricing.
If the current incomprehensible pricing scheme persists at the end of the year, I will subsequently spend my unproductive time reading the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and BBC News instead of the New York Times.
@George: That explains two things: why my dad didn’t get the Lincoln offer, and the extent of Mr. Smurl’s ineptitude. Being a few years older than Dr. Greenspun, I don’t think I qualify as “younger age,” And since I drive a 2009 Toyota Corolla, strongly doubt that I qualify as either a “thought leader” or the audience Lincoln is seeking to attract.
Heavy reading of the NYTimes seems to be it. I was also offered a Lincoln subscription, and I have been a heavy/mostly regular reader of the NYT since 2002.
http://bit.ly/h4epUr — a little survey on the issue. Philip, why not run for office and see if you can get GE to pay for the Lincoln?
Thanks, Cesar! I don’t think office-holders in Massachusetts can automatically score a Lincoln Navigator the way that their counterparts in Washington, D.C. are able to! I wouldn’t mind being a Republican legislator in Massachusetts, the way that Scott Brown was for 15-or-so years. There would be no need to show up to work (since the Democrats control everything). I would be accruing a full year of pension vesting for every calendar year, even if I only worked one day during that year. Plus the health care benefits have got to be awesome. Finally there would be the chance to ride around in the $4 million twin-engine State Police Eurocopters (see http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/local_news/x886971491 for how Deval Patrick used this $2,000/hour machine to visit an art museum).