I cancelled my print / online subscription to the New York Times back in 2006 or maybe early 2007. Either way, I could no longer justify the cost even though I was a Graduate student at the time, getting a student discount. For my interests, I could get everything I needed for free online at NYTimes.com and I wasn’t even stealing! NY Times was offering their content for free and when Times Select died, it was ALL free. At that point, for me, the print version made no sense at all.
I stopped paying, and the content kept flowing. How hell is this possible? It isn’t. So we get this:
I have no problem with this, the problem is that NYT as a company cannot make any money. I repeat, the most trafficked newspaper site in the United States can’t break even! WTF? Why pay a dividend? Well, that’s another matter I suppose.
Micro-payments. I’m sure others have mentioned micro-payments as a revenue supplement, but it hasn’t been tried yet, not that I know of. But a curious thing happened to me today. As I recently tweeted,
metaprinter I would have gladly paid 10cents to watch this Tyson / David Carr interview. http://tinyurl.com/6sha83 NYT has no revenue model.
In between watching the Obama inauguration and working, I stumbled upon, watched, and enjoyed the aforementioned Mike Tyson interview. Afterward and still now, I wish I could have clicked a button to pay 10cents for the video. Set up through PayPal, I can see a one click (two max) feature bringing in money.
Smaller than spot.us, smaller than Kiva.org Micro-payments. Just an idea. One of many floating around.
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