The New York Times Is Bullish On Twitter

Image via CrunchBaseThe New York Times is Twitter's new best friend. I have cultivated a new habit. Now when I see a link to a New York Times article even on the New York Times website itself, I copy the subject line and feed it into the Twitter search engine. Twitter has never failed me so far. There is always some soul out there, usually a whole bunch of souls, that have tweeted out that particular New York Times article. It is called crowdsourcing the need and desire to not pay the New York Times a dime.

Me In The New York Times

Why would they do that? It is not like the New York Times gets a dime every time I click over to a New York Times article on Twitter. To me it feels like the New York Times is in love with Twitter and would like to get the masses onto the Twitter platform.

I also like the idea of not hitting the 20 article limit for the month. It is not like I use up my quota and then hit up Twitter for my New York Times fix. No, buddy, no. Twitter is what I hit first, middle and last. It is like keeping a whole bunch of fuel saved up at Farmville.

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Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

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New York Times: 100,000 PayWall Payers

Image by Laughing Squid via FlickrThe New York Times did not get me, but looks like it got 100,000 people and counting. When they erected the paywall I think they had an inkling as to this number. But the numbers are still not adding up for me.

Let's crunch. 100,000 people paying $20 each is two million. Is that per year? Per month? If it is per year, the paywall is a fail whale. If it is per month, the paywall might still be a fail whale, although a smaller one. 20 million can't keep the New York Times afloat.

And while we are at it, I'd like to know how much traffic has been lost in the mean time.

New York Times Paywall Sucks (2)
New York Times Paywall Sucks
New York Times: A Dog's Got To Eat

If you don't want to pay right now the formula is look for the article on Twitter. It is very unlikely someone has not tweeted it out already. Supposedly when you click on a New York Times article over from Twitter, that article is free. And the experience is adventurous. That is a good reason to not pay.

GigaOm: The NYT: Portrait of an Old Media Giant in Transition: a traditional media giant that is trying desperately to move into the digital future, but keeps getting dragged back down by the weight of its declining legacy businesses ..... The paper’s newly launched “metered access” pay plan has brought in 100,000 subscribers, and its online advertising revenue rose. But that was more than offset by a sharp drop in profits and a continuing decline in ad revenue. For the NYT, it seems to be one step forward and two steps backwards. ...... about 100,000 people have signed up as a result of its subscription plan (although visitors and pageviews have fallen ...... $20 million in annual revenue ..... making $20 million in a year from its subscription plan is a drop in the financial bucket: the company’s operating costs for its News Media Group, which includes the New York Times and the Boston Globe, were $500 million for the first quarter alone ...... Even if the subscription plan hits its goal of 300,000 subscribers, it will only generate about $60 million in revenue, which is barely enough to move the needle for a company of the NYT’s size — and that’s not including the cost of implementing the wall in the first place. ...... profit for the quarter fell by more than 50 percent, and operating profit was down by almost 30 percent. Advertising revenue fell by more than 4 percent compared with the previous year, circulation revenues fell by almost 4 percent as well, and newsprint expenses climbed by almost 13 percent. Digital advertising rose by 4.5 percent, but didn’t even come close to making up for the 7.5 percent decline in print advertising, which still accounts for about 70 percent of the company’s overall ad revenue. ....... the Christian Science Monitor couldn’t accomplish its transformation without shutting down its daily newspaper and focusing exclusively online.

My prescription for the New York Times from 2009 still stands.

New York Times, Don't Die, Live

Go completely digital. Go multimedia. Go hyperlocal and global. Sell your own ads.

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New York Times Paywall Sucks

Image via WikipediaSo yesterday the New York Times website kept bombarding me with pop ups saying I had only two more articles left for the month, two out of 20.

They should have warned me at 10 left. I would not have read all those travel articles I read: vicarious living.

Pop ups are bad. Period. Don't do pop ups. Firefox climbed up by simply helping you fight pop ups. What is the New York Times thinking?

Tear Down This Paywall

I thought I read somewhere that if you show up at a New York Times article from some social media destination like Twitter or Facebook, that does not count against your monthly limit. Well, I did.

I went from this tweet to this article. And the pop up said I had only one more article for the month. Why? Did it not register that it was a tweet from Steve Case? This is not working for me.

I am not big on pop ups.

Look, I am not paying. I am going elsewhere. Otherwise I have been in the habit of tweeting out almost every New York Times article I ever read. For the 45,000 followers I have on Twitter, that was free marketing for you.

While the New York Times figures out a better business model, hello there Washington Post.

New York Times: A Dog's Got To Eat
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Paul Orlando In The New York Times

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