Hours before it launched, the NYT offered a discounted “digital subscription” rate of 99 cents for the first 4 weeks.
But it seems it’s a complicated paywall. One that even NYT employees don’t understand, according to financial journalist and Reuters blogger Felix Salmon, who wrote: “If the NYT can’t explain the paywall to its own staff, there’s no way it’s going to be able to explain it to its readers.”
Here’s how it’s supposed to work:
In order to get unlimited access to the NYT website the Times smartphone app, subcribers have to pay $15 a month. $20 a month gets you unlimited website access, plus the iPad app (but not smartphone apps). If you want to have access to everything, you have to fork out $35 a month. If you’re a paid newspaper subscriber, you get the online access gratis.
If you don’t become a “digital subscriber,” you can click through 20 articles a month for free. After that, you will get this when you click on a NYT story:
But for that to happen, you would’ve had to exceed the number of freebie views the NYT allows per month to non-subscribers. Ah… but you can even bypass that roadblock and read more than those 20 allotted monthly articles. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger himself gives his readers the scoop on how to do it in a letter he wrote yesterday announcing the changes:
“Readers who come to Times articles through links from search engines, blogs and social media will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit. This allows new and casual readers to continue to discover our content on the open Web. On all major search engines, users will have a daily limit on free links to Times articles.”
There’s a lot riding on the NYT paywall. If they can succeed, we can anticipate a lot more publications following suit.
