New York Times to charge for online content – a good idea?

The New York Times wants to charge you for the content you read online. Faced with declining revenue for their print editions, the NYT needs a way to bring in more money. But is charging for reading the news online the best solution? This question is hard to answer, given that there are so many free news aggregate sites out there that people can go to for their daily news fix.

Personally, I would not pay to just read NYT articles online. I’d simply go somewhere else. I’m not saying a fee-based access to articles will not work. It has been quite successful for sites like the Wall Street Journal, according to this CNN article:

Among the country’s largest newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal has managed to continue charging online subscription fees. The New York Times abandoned a two-year experiment with the Web-subscription model in 2007, suggesting that the company’s projections for subscriber revenue were small compared with advertising sales.

The article even reports that some newspapers, like the San Francisco Chronicle have tried to push consumers back to the print edition by publishing print-only articles. Schemes like that are doomed for failure in the long run. It’s like trying to keep people riding horses and wagons rather than move to automobiles for transportation.

Paying for online content on newspapers sites like the NYT is not popular:

However, such a plan isn’t likely to garner much support from readers. A Harris poll released earlier this month found that 77 percent said they wouldn’t pay anything to read a newspaper’s stories on the Web.

I recently heard that the percentage of readers not willing to pay is as high as 88%. This is a problem.

Offer more than just articles to paying online subscribers

The only way I can see a pay-based model working for the NYT is if they offer paying subscribers much more than access to their articles. I’m not sure exactly what they’d have to offer to entice more subscribers. Exclusive videos, interviews and more multimedia content? But that’s already available to readers for free right now. The NYT would have to come up with something clever to get people to pay.

You tell me: What would entice you to pay for the NYT online?

Papers cannot subsidize print editions with online content

It seems that this is the strategy more newspapers are taking: Subsidize the print newspapers with the online version. This simply won’t work. It takes a lot of money and resources to publish a daily newspaper. The cost is much more than the online revenue can support.

One option that a few local papers are trying is to get rid of the print edition altogether. This eliminates the cost of printing, delivery and paper supplies. But I highly doubt a paper like the NYT would take such a blod move.

Are readers entitled to free online content?

This question has come up a lot lately in the various blogs I read. There is a vocal group out there that say that, no, readers aren’t entitled to anything for free. We should just accept that we’re going to have to pay for digital content just as we’d pay for print content.

I’d beg to differ. Readers are the market for the various news outlets out there. If the market demands free digital content, then providers like the NYT need to pay attention or readers will go elsewhere. While I don’t have the answers for the NYT about how to accomplish this and still bring in money, it’s something they need to figure out, and fast.

Some might argue that if readers must pay for other types of digital content like ebooks, then why can’t we pay to read the paper online? My answer is that ebooks are a unique product, while newspapers publish news that is distributed via multiple outlets and is generally available to everyone.

This is a complicated issue and there are no easy answers. What do you think? Is it a good idea for the NYT to charge online readers? Or do they need to find some other source of revenue? Share your thoughts below and leave a comment.

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