NYTimes Goes Freemium
The New York Times has confirmed that it will be moving to a fee-based, ‘metered’ model on its website in 2011. For those of us in the tech industry, we will immediately recognize this as the ‘freemium’ business model, which is used by many web service businesses, like Flickr and Basecamp. People get a basic account for free, but have to move up to premium, fee-supported services when they want to surpass some limits, like number of projects or how many photos you can view.
Personally, I think they have taken the wrong path: they should be charging for social news, not more news.
Social news lines up with the social revolution directly. Instead of charging for the 20th article, the NYTimes.com could be charging me to manage a network of followers and followings. I would honestly be more interested in what Bill Keller and Tim O’Reilly are reading this morning and what they think of it, than all the obits and sports news in the world.
The New York Times is one of the more experimental newspaper companies out there. TimesPeople, Skimmer, and the NYTimes Reader demonstrate that they can sling code just like software companies do. But instead of thinking about it as a web service with customers like me who want more features they are stuck thinking about it as a newspaper where people want more articles. Which we don’t.
I want to know what people care about, and the news is a means to that end. What I need is an online system to help me make sense of the news, and the only hope for that is a social context through which news flows.
Several of the obvious barriers to the New Yorks Times doing this are conceptual. Since they see themselves as the source of sense making — what the editorial page is supposed to do — they are reluctant to let mere readerlings opine in a major way on their service. And they are also the authors of their own journalism, so they wouldn’t want us to stream other news sources through their back yard.
It’s all so parochial that it’s hard not to laugh.
But I am not opposed to paying for service: I pay hundreds every year for a hosted blog on Typepad, for example. But why doesn’t the New York Times offer me a hosted blog service with modules based on how the NYTimes.com site works? As just one example, I would love to have an integrated database where I could create entries about companies, individuals, issues, and topics, with automatic backlinks to stories I have posted, touching on them.
At any rate, that may seem awfully mercantile to them. But I read somewhere that the Guardian is making 30% of its revenue selling things to readers. And the Times is always trying to sell me photos from the past, or wine. Why not become a software company? All the successful media companies of the future will look like software companies, constantly upgrading their technology base. It is *the* source of all competitive advantage as the world goes digital.
And if they don’t, I wonder if this will still be true in five years?
NYTimes.com
is the No. 1 newspaper-owned Web site and a top five current events and
global news site according to Nielsen Online.
