[...] Para algunos: “Times should think about a suite of TimesChannels: TimesTravel, Times Tech, TimesGourmet, TimesDesign…“. [...]

[...] send themselves right out of business. What was leaked a while back in regards to the Times’ gold/silver special access model of charging is exactly the wrong thing to do. Let’s see if they’ve evolved the model past that into [...]

[...] Journalism Labs: The Times should focus on niches, not Silver/Gold.  Unbelievable quote. “…with NYT Gold you won’t just read the Times [...]

How Quantcast arrived at the breakdown of “addicts” and others is a real mystery. Similarly I wonder how you came to your assumptions about the percentages of visitors who would decide to pay for a membership. If you are using the Times experience with their abandoned fee-for-editorials” attempt some time ago, I doubt very much those data have anything at all to do with the situation today, now that some newspapers have actually bitten the dust and just about everyone has felt the pinch of the financial fiasco and current economic slump. We understand far better now how quickly some large institutions can disappear over night, creating a whole new unknown to complicate any estimates of the effect of a big change in a business plan today.

If your estimates are based on other web site experimentation with pay-for-content schemes, it should be remembered that the Times is almost completely unique in it size, coverage, and the regard in which it is held world-wide. It will be fun to watch the plan, whatever it is, work itself out. I think the Times will come out fine, if they keep their product as available as possible to all strata of society.

There is one exception: if the Times wants to put its sports reporting behind a wall of kryptonite that only the super-rich can access, I guess that would be okay.

First, NYTimes.com uniques are running at about 15 million, according to Compete.com, or 11 million, per Quantcast. Take your pick, but it’s not 20 million, although it was closer to that level back in February.

Quantcast says 1 percent of those are “addicts” and 30 percent are “regulars”. The rest are passers-by who are unlikely prospects for any kind of paid service.

With the kind of survey the Times is doing, they might get 10 percent of the “addicts” and “regulars” to say they might buy at Silver, and some negligible percentage at Gold. Reality should temper that down to a 3 percent assumption, which means (using the Quantcast count) 330,000 members or $16.5 million per year. Maybe Gold contributes another $1 million, and after expenses the Times adds $15 million, or 10 percent, to its bottom line.

Now suppose, instead, it takes the niche approach, starting with the biggest niche there is: sports. Isn’t it likely that TimesSports could attract 330,000 members paying $50? Start by putting on the paid side most of the deep sports stats the Times has online. If the Times ends up keeping the Boston Globe, or partnering with a spun-off Globe, deeper coverage of the RedSox-Yankees rivalry, alone, could generate that kind of interest. (The joke when the Times bought the Globe for $1.3 billion was “Helluva price to pay for a sports department.”) The global combined populations of Red Sox and Yankee Nations is at least 100 million. (Yes, I know this has been tried with mixed results, but The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Packers Insider is a successful model to emulate here.)

My point is that one niche can generate the same revenue as Silver and Gold might be expected to yield. And sure, to some of the commenters, if you subscribe to one niche, the next one should come cheaper.

I understand that print is going away, probably to disappear around the time Florida sinks under the waves (not that soon, I believe). The Times has at least 20 million unique visits a month, and I doubt that would drop substantially if it charged around $50 a year for access. Perhaps a second, lower, price point would be good for students and seniors which could cancel most of that slippage. Even the Times thinks that is doable, since that range is proposed in a survey now making the rounds.

Any hint of a level of reporting that is accessible only to the well-off puts the Times in league with the WSJ, and is against the principles that make the Times what it is. There is a point at which honorable people would feel compelled to sacrifice THEIR principles to find that content for free. There are, for instance, relatively easy ways to get WSJ content for free, not that I want to.

I agree that the ability to download sections fits the “niche” structure you propose, but it MUST be in addition to complete access to all other content with a paid subscription. The tradeoff for losing print subscribers is the VAST increase in online subscribers, a business model that really seems able, once the public understands the economics of the situation, to support a great enterprise in the style to which it has become accustomed.

[...] NY Times seems to be going with this. Conversely, Martin Langveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab does not like the idea at [...]

The larger context here is that there’s an irreversible shift of consumer preference (in terms of time, attention and convenience) away from print and toward digital delivery.

That shift is going to entail charges for content, but it’s the niche interests that will enable charging, not the general news. How you get from here to there, in terms of generating higher value niche content for those packages, is a different question, of course.

Your suggestion (if I understand it right) that the Times enable sectional subscriptions on Kindle is excellent, I think, and very much lines up with having niche subscriptions on the Web.

[...] Read the rest of this post on the original site Read the whole story at the Source [...]

[...] Read the rest of this post on the original site [...]

The Times is trying not to fire anybody right now. How do you think you would ask these reporters to write more at length and “deeper”? And why would you think less well-off people would not miss “serious” content?

Setting up exclusive areas is elitist and antidemocratic. The Times online needs an across the board annual fee of no more than $50 which gives access to all areas and archives. If certain news aggregators want to use Times content, they should pay a negotiated price for the right to do so.

For extras, I would pay for the ability to download to my Kindle (after the Times gets out of its ludicrous c ontract with Amazon) the Book Review, the Science section, Magazine articles, and so on.

[...] el debate que se está generando viene por el lado de: Medios Generalistas o Medios de Nicho. Lo que se dice es que por qué un lector va a pagar por artículos que no le interesan, que no tienen que ver con sus gustos y afinidades. Y se cuestiona la estrategia del NYT por [...]

[...] Lab: The Times should focus on niches, not Silver and Gold. Great quote. The pitch for Gold “with NYT Gold, you won’t just read [...]