{"id":3533,"date":"2011-03-28T00:12:41","date_gmt":"2011-03-28T04:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=3533"},"modified":"2011-03-28T00:12:41","modified_gmt":"2011-03-28T04:12:41","slug":"how-did-the-new-york-times-manage-to-spend-40-million-on-its-pay-wall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/28\/how-did-the-new-york-times-manage-to-spend-40-million-on-its-pay-wall\/","title":{"rendered":"How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg<\/a>; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.<\/p>\n

What am I missing?<\/p>\n

[I built a pay wall back in 1995 for the MIT Press, restricting access to some of their journals, e.g., Cell<\/em>, to individual subscribers and people whose IP addresses indicated that they were at institutions with site-wide subscriptions. I can’t remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nHow did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall? - Philip Greenspun\u2019s Weblog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/28\/how-did-the-new-york-times-manage-to-spend-40-million-on-its-pay-wall\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall? 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