Half of print subscribers at half the price is a quarter of $39m, or $9.75m. I just wacked nearly $10m out of your numbers.

No wonder American newspapers are going down the drain – dodgy budgeting!

Whatever it is that they charge, $1 a week, etc, it really needs to be a dollar. It plays into your near-free idea, but keeps people coming. They’ll make much more of a profit. People are HAPPY to pay a dollar, it’s chump change. More people will do it, especially if they do an easy auto-pay system, and link into Google Checkout, PayPal, etc. It’s like iTunes downloads. People will see it as equivalent to paying for a song. You’re paying for the news, OK, a dollar.

Frankly, if the NYT changed its editorial bias, it would pick up readers. Being so radically left-wing has damaged its reputation severely.

This is old-world thinking to a new age platform.

Speaking for myself (and I earn $33,000 a year, which makes me more or less the median American worker): $60 is definitely near the upper limit of what I’d pay for NYT content in its current form. I would not be likely to pay $7 a month.

As for point #2, the Times is the only newspaper I would consider paying for online. I don’t perceive there to be enough relevant content in my local papers for them to be worth anywhere close to that much money.

In any case, I think your math is wrong on your first point. If half of the print subscribers paid $2.50 a month, that would bring in $9.75 million, not $19.5 million (650,000 subscribers divided by 2, times 2.50 a month, times 12 months). The lower number bolsters your point.

I suppose that edges towards an FT style model that some people above have already mentioned. But is it also worth considering that the ads on the NYT domestic and international editions are the same? Is the paper ever going to be in a position to sell ads to a highly international audience?

I’m afraid that I’m outside of my knowledge here: are small, homogenous readerships more valuable to advertisers than large, diverse ones?

(I think your 19.5million figure is a typo and needs to be halved, based on your maths.)

I guess my overarching point is that the Venn diagram of people who are willing to pay anything for the Times has an awful lot of overlap with the universe of people who would pay at least, say, $10 a month for the Times. That’s not true for most papers, but the Times audience is different, and it seems odd to be settling for that low a price point with their audience.

My first paragraph should end:

“On the other hand, I think they’ll have trouble charging more than $60 a year or even $20 a year.”

I should note that I am a paying subscriber to ESPN.com Insider. I don’t have numbers on that model, but all the basic content is free to everyone. My money gets me extra content (especially analysis), scouting reports and other stuff that mainly appeals to people who want really minute details.

Whatever the Times ends up doing, I think it would be wise to keep a lot of content free to everyone. You can make additional money — beyond advertising — off of people like me with additional features and content.

But I do think in this case the Times thinks it’s in its best interest to maximize paying subscribers, not subscription revenue. If all the best journalism in the world goes into pay models, they want to be thought of as the best place to go, attracting the most viewers at a reasonable price. And if they can do that, it might turn out that they maximize the combined advertising plus subscription revenue, since there’s obviously a tradeoff. These surveys are intended to find the sweet spot.

And yes, the metered approach should be intended to push multi-month subs — I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. That would be simple: “You’ve run out of pageviews this month. You can pay $20 for unlimited access for the next 30 days. Or you can pay $60 for unlimited access for the next year.”

Incidentally, the surveys have been going on for some time. As a registered Times site user, I was asked to respond to a very similar one about 2-3 months ago.

This is a tricky road. The problem is that you’re right even if they made an extra $50 million or so from charging people, that’s not going to really solve many of their issues. On the other hand, I think they’ll have trouble charging more than $60 a year or even $60 a year.

The Times may want to try a tiered approach. Why just discuss one pricing model or point?

I am optimistic that the Times is talking about charging for access, which is something that journalism organizations have. The one many news orgs have is knowledgeable journalists. I think there might be a way to get people to pay for chats with some of their favorite journalists, especially if those chats involve guests.

Thomas Friedman could have a chat on Globalization and he’ll invite a professor or two to join him. The chat would be highly interactive with Friedman taking questions from readers and responding to them. It would also be intimate. The chat could even be limited to a 100 people.

The Times could have many opportunities like this to interact with its most popular talent throughout the year. Opportunities like this don’t have to be limited to a set pricing model.

The Times will have to tread lightly when it comes to charing for standard content (I don’t think this will work), but there are almost limitless opportunities to make money, especially with a brand like the Times.

Is this proposed model half the price of Times Select? I thought TS was $49 a year; this is $60.

And I really don’t think the NYT would be wise to even consider papers like Seattle/Dallas/Miami/whatever as competition to be strategized against. The competition is the free web, not the Houston Chronicle. So I’d argue that a pricing model that sets the pricing bar higher helps both the Times and regional papers.

Mathew: I agree, I think the uptake will be smaller than my numbers estimate. On the other hand, I suspect the strength of the Times brand (and the strength of nytimes.com) will lead it to have a significantly higher willing-to-pay rate than most U.S. newspapers — so I’m willing (happy!) to be surprised on the high side.