Does the NYT's tightening of the digital screws tell us that the original crackdown has been a success or a failure?

Come April, the magic number of monthly
free NYT content clicks drops from 20 to 10.

by Ken

While working on last night's post, which included links to a pair of Paul Krugman columns along with my refusals-to-link to a NYT blogpost and an article on the ground that they weren't worth wasting precious free clicks on, I stumbled for the first time across the announcement of the impending change in nytimes.com's policy on access by "visitors." The message read:

"Beginning in April, visitors to NYTimes.com will have access to 10 free articles per month instead of 20."

My goodness, has it already been a year since the Times put in place the present system of offering subscriptions for access to website content, with a freeloaders' exemption of 20 pieces of NYT content per month. (I wrote about a year plus two days ago as "For the NYT's sake, I hope its new digital subscription system works, but all I know is that I don't expect to participate."

I certainly understood the logic of the move. "In the simplest terms," I wrote, "is it really not obvious to one and all that if the company can't generate revenue from the stuff it publishes, it can't afford to continue publishing the stuff?" And as badly as the paper does so many of its jobs as the "newspaper of record," considering how much worse most everyone else does them, try imagining a media world without the Times.

None of which, I suspected, was likely to persuade me to sign up again as a paying customer. (I say "again" because, as I mentioned, I'd been a daily home-delivery customer for more years than I cared to count, until I had enough of playing the daily game of wondering whether I would or wouldn't find my paper downstairs in the morning.)

At the time of the original change, the NYT movers and shakers professed pride in the quantity of free content they were allowing us freeloaders. In an online Q&A, nytimes.com's "vice president for paid products," Paul Spurl, explained to a reader who wasn't a subscriber but bought the paper every single day that no, this wouldn't qualify him/her for free access, but "we do encourage you to take advantage of the large amount of free content that will still be available to you on NYTimes.com and on our mobile apps." (Speaking of mobile access, it rankled me, by the way, that it was being included in the subscription package at no additional cost, meaning that I would be paying for a service I had no intention of using.)

Now the NYT command has decided to be half as generous in the "amount of free content" available to us schnorrers. If you follow the current link to "learn more about this change," you learn:

This change will strengthen our ability to continue providing the world’s most insightful journalism today. It will also support the ongoing development of digital innovations and apps that make The Times an experience you won’t find anywhere else.

And if you venture farther, into the tiny-type world of "Questions About Visiting," you come to:

Why is The Times changing its free access from 20 free articles a month to 10?
We think 10 articles a month, plus free access to our home page, strikes a better balance between visiting and subscribing. Most of our readers will continue to enjoy their Times experience without interruption. At the same time, the change provides us with an opportunity to convince another segment of our audience that what The Times has to offer is worth paying for.

What's not clear to me is whether the change is being made in triumph or distress. Has the 20-click monthly limit being dialed back because it's been so successful in converting "visitors" to customers that the paper now feels empowered to tighten the screw farther? Or, contrarily, has it disappointed to the point where the deciders feel that they must take further steps to circumscribe us damned freeloading visitors?

As far as I can tell from reading the current batch of information, explanation, and clarifications, the basic rules remain unchanged apart from the halving of the monthly "click allotment."

Continue Reading as a Visitor

* Get 10 articles each month on NYTimes.com, as well as access to the home page, section fronts, blog frontsand classifieds.

* Articles, blog posts, slide shows, video and other multimedia will continue to count against your free
monthly limit. [A subsequent clarification explains that "the monthly limit is based on items, not page views: a multi-page article or slide show counts as one item (or one 'article view'). Additionally, reader contributions (comments) do not count toward your monthly limit." I indeed wondered about this.]

* If you’ve already read your 10 free articles, you can still read our content through links from Facebook, Twitter, search engines and blogs.

The exclusion of content reached via third-party link means that the understandable initial apprehension that 10 clicks would be nearly used up by a month's allotment of eight or nine Krugman columns isn't necessarily the case, since links to them can normally be found all over the Web within hours of posting.

In March 2011, I got as far as breaking the new development down into two questions: (1) Is this a good idea? (2) Will it work? I couldn't answer either question then, and I still can't. I know that I've been extremely parsimonious in using my "free 20," and probably haven't often coming close to using up the full allotment. I guess I'll learn to live within the new magic number.

Which isn't going to help the NYT establish a workable economic model to continue putting out a daily newspaper. I'm glad that's not my job.

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