There are so many ways to get around the New York Times paywall (or, as someone called it when it debuted, its pay fence) but if you subscribe to the NYT on your Amazon Kindle, you are now “entitled to complete online coverage of breaking news, articles, videos, audio clips, multimedia and blogs on NYTimes.com” free of charge.
Amazon had promised this would be coming, so it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. → Read More
The New York Times Company this morning reported Q1 2011 earnings per share of $.04, compared with $.08 in the same period of 2010.
Total revenues decreased 3.6 percent to $566.5 million from $587.9 million. The publisher’s operating profit came in at $31.1 million for the quarter, compared with $52.7 million in the same period of 2010.
Approximately three weeks after the global launch of its digital subscription packages, NYT reports paid digital subscribers have surpassed 100,000, although it cautions that it does not yet have visibility into conversion and retention rates for these paying customers after the initial promotional period. → Read More
In a move sure to irk at least two or three people who work for The New York Times, The Huffington Post (owned by AOL, our own masters in some degree of command) has put up a paywall that applies only to NYT employees.
In a message to affected potential readers of HuffPost content, founder Arianna Huffington explains that NYT employees can henceforth access only one article for free per month. → Read More
The New York Times, struggling to find its place digitally, has just released an iPhone update today, three days before its paywall plan is put into action. Well what’s new?
In addition to an interface touch up and the option to swipe between stories, the app now has Recently Viewed items at the top of it’s Sections section, followed in order by Photos and Video, which were not at the top before. The update purportedly will add more videos and slideshows to the app, so the re-prioritization of these options makes sense (and also cents, as these two content types have proven to be the most addicting for readers). The NYT Blogs like Dealbook and Media Decoder have (finally) been relegated to their own section, at the bottom of the app. → Read More
When the details of the New York Times paywall/fence were announced on Thursday, Times PR representatives told press that it would be placing a five article a day limit on Google referrals, and only Google referrals.
This policy has somehow changed over the weekend, as the Times’ Communications Manager Kristin Mason tells me that the five article limit will now extend to “all major search engines.” Apparently the Google-only clause was only specific to the Canadian roll out and will be lifted during when the paywall launches worldwide on March 28th. → Read More
The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — or at lest 4/5ths of them were decked out with iPad 2s. That didn’t prevent the usual argument from breaking out about the New York Times’ pay wall. The Grey Lady announced a social plus subscription model, and @dannysullivan was having none of it. It’s 2011 but the battle lines continue to be drawn over publishing v. the Web. Many believe the subscription wall will destroy what’s left of the print business model without replacing it with an iPad alternative.
Others (me) think the Times has got it just about right, leaving a gaping hole through social media (Facebook and Twitter) to consume the newspaper as before while creating a pool of found money around the iPad version. As social @mentioners create an authoritative stream of Times citations that do not trigger a sub request, the resulting high-value audience will migrate to a reasonable iPad based environment where those social signals can be harnessed through realtime chat, video, and other engaged value adds and attendant revenue opportunities. Whether it will take 15 years or is already a formidable tipping point will be left to the viewer to decide. → Read More
More details emerged today about the New York Times’ digital paywall, which will go up at the end of March. As far as paywalls go, it’s not terrible. Subscribers to the print edition don’t have to pay anything extra to read online or in mobile apps, links to individual articles from blogs and other news sites won’t be blocked, and the paywall only goes up if you read more than 20 articles a month. That’s all fairly reasonable and forward-thinking.
But there is one part of the pricing plan that is wrong-headed. It discriminates by device. Depending on what device you read the paper on, you will be charged differently for an all-digital subscription. The pricing plans start at $15 a month for Web access plus iPhone, Android, or other smartphone apps. On the iPad or other tablets, it will cost $20 a month. And if you want to switch between the Web, phone, and tablet, that will cost you $35 a month. And Kindle subscriptions are not included. (Plus, the pricing is for every four weeks, meaning that the billing cycle will be padded even more). → Read More
The New York Times has just put up more information about its much awaited paywall. The digital subscription model was initially announced in January 2010 as an effort to create a second revenue stream while still preserving the newspaper’s advertising business.
As we heard earlier, the subscription plan allows for free access to a set amount of content across digital platforms. When the monthly reading limit is reached, users who are not already home delivery subscribers will be asked to become digital subscribers. The subscription model will be implemented in the United States and globally on March 28, 2011.
In Canada, digital subscriptions will be launched today. → Read More
Tomorrow, all eyes will be on the launch of News Corp’s iPad newspaper The Daily, but huddled away in a downtown loft in New York City’s meatpacking district a team from betaworks and the New York Times are busy putting together their answer to what an iPad news app should be. The collaboration will be called News.me, and it won’t look anything like The Daily. I know because I’ve been playing with an early version of the app, which I will describe in detail below along with the first-ever published screenshots of the app.
News.me is a social news reading app that presents the news that the people you follow on Twitter are reading, and filters it based on how many times those stories are shared and clicked on overall. It pulls in data from not only Twitter but also bit.ly, the betaworks company that shortens billions of shared links every month. In contrast, The Daily will produce its own articles and videos with a staff of 100 journalists. It is not clear how many social features will be included in The Daily, but the emphasis seems to be more on the original content. We’ll find out more tomorrow (I’ll be covering the launch). → Read More
Editor’s note: Henry “Hank” Nothhaft, Jr. is the co-founder and CMO of Trapit, a virtual personal assistant for Web content still in private beta that was incubated out of SRI and the CALO project (as was Siri, the conversational search engine bought by Apple).
One of the most interesting concepts to emerge in media and tech lately is that of “serendipity”—showing people what they want even if they didn’t ask for it.
Despite its seemingly ubiquitous invocation, however, the concept of serendipity remains ill-defined and put forth as some vague panacea for a slew of emerging innovations hoping to attract new users in droves. What is needed is a closer look at what we actually mean when we talk about serendipity. → Read More
As one of the world’s leading media publishers, it’s critical for The New York Times Company to stay ahead of the curve in the digital space, or die trying. Hence, its efforts on the desktop with Times Reader 2.0, as well as its mobile website and multi-platform applications.
But the company has now come up with an additional way of deriving (sorely needed) revenues from its mobile apps apart from selling or slapping ads on them: licensing. → Read More
One of the most exciting things to watch in tech these days is various groups’ estimates for Zynga’s revenues. Depending on what you read and on what day, they are all over the map. It’s been that way for a long time too, because the social gaming service is simply growing so fast and monetizing the hell out of their properties. Now that we’re more than halfway into 2010, the consensus seems clear that Zynga made about $300 million in revenue in 2009. But 2010 is proving even tougher to nail down, it seems.
The New York Times has a feature on Zynga that’s online now but running the paper tomorrow. In it, they cite data from Inside Network, a service that tracks Facebook and social games, stating that Zynga is on pace to make $835 million in revenue this year. That huge — unfortunately, it’s not true. NYT actually read the data from Inside Network’s wrong. Their data said that $835 million would be the revenue for the social gaming market as a whole in 2010. We’ve confirmed with both Inside Networks and Zynga that NYT got that wrong. → Read More
In the first quarter of the year, The New York Times Company announced upbeat earnings results, reporting a profit and growing digital advertising sales, albeit after significantly scaling down costs last year.
Earlier this morning, the media company released earnings for the second quarter, and things aren’t looking terrible for them – but not stellar either.
The company’s Q2 profit declined 18 percent to $32 million, compared to the same period a year earlier, when it recorded a $37.7 million tax benefit and net income of $39 million. On an operating basis, profit more than doubled, increasing from $23.5 million to $60.8 million. → Read More
The New York Times ran a controversial op-ed piece yesterday entitled “The Google Algorithm.” Basically, the piece wonders if the government shouldn’t step in to control the way Google tweaks its search engine results. Obviously, Google is going to want to respond to that. And now they have. Bizarrely.
Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, has written a post for the Financial Times today. Okay, normally Google responds to these things on its own blog, but whatever, that’s not that strange. What is strange is that it appears the post is a whole two paragraphs in length. That’s because it’s actually behind a registration wall. Yes, Google is responding to this important issue behind a wall. So much for open data. → Read More
Too funny. According to The Awl, The New York Times standards editor Phil Corbett yesterday reportedly sent out a memo (below) to NYT writers asking them to severely cut down on the use of the word ‘tweet’ outside of “orrnithological contexts”. It appears to be a myth, but a funny one at least.
Corbett has been overseeing language issues for the paper’s newsroom since September 2009, and was previously in charge of revisions in the newsroom’s style manual as deputy news editor.
Update: Dave Itzkoff, who blogs for the Times, tweets that the report is indeed not true. Which makes it a perfect satirical piece worth sharing anyway. Update 2: Another New York Times staffer tells us privately that the memo is “100% real” and Itzkoff clarifies that it is not the memo’s existence he was denying, but that some journalists inside the NYT recognize “tweet” as a word and there is an internal debate ongoing about it. → Read More
BanxCorp this morning announced that it has filed a federal antitrust complaint against nine firms, including Dow Jones & Co, Fox News, The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.
The company alleges (PDF) that the nine companies engage in “unlawful per se horizontal market division, customer allocation, and price fixing agreements” with its competitors in the market for bank rate websites throughout the United States. → Read More
After significantly scaling down costs, The New York Times Company this morning announced upbeat Q1 2010 results, reporting a profit and growing digital advertising sales.
NYT’s operating profit grew more than fivefold in the first quarter of 2010, to $83.3 million compared with $16.4 million in the first quarter of 2009. Total revenues were down 3.2% in Q1, to $587.9 million from $607.1 million in the same period last year.
That’s not bad news, considering that the media company reported a decline of 11.5 percent in last quarter before that (Q4 2009). → Read More
We had some fun yesterday for April Fools day, fake-covering the launch of the New York Times iPad app by replacing some words of an article in the paper published back in 1996 upon the launch of its first Website.
Now, the company has introduced its iPad app for real. It’s free and both advertiser-sponsored and advertising-supported, but there’s also a “full, paid app” in the works. → Read More
The New York Times will begin publishing daily on the iPad, offering readers around the world immediate access to most of the daily newspaper’s contents.
The New York Times on the iPad, as the electronic publication is known, contains most of the news and feature articles from the current day’s printed newspaper, classified advertising, reporting that does not appear in the newspaper, and interactive features including the newspaper’s crossword puzzle.
The iPad App (address: http:/www.nytimes.com) is part of a strategy to extend the readership of The Times and to create opportunities for the company in the electronic media industry, said Martin Nisenholtz, president of The New York Times Electronic Media Company. → Read More
The New York Times Company has teamed up with RMG Networks to have some of its digital content displayed on part of the latter’s network of out-of-home screens. The partnership is said to bring NYTimes content to some 850 screens, located in district cafés and eateries in the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco markets.
The new initiative, dubbed “NYTimes.com Today”, will feature the latest news headlines, photos, and a selection of videos exclusively from NYTimes.com – along with advertising units – on the digital location-based network operated by RMG Networks. There’s also a mobile aspect to the story, as viewers can head to NYT2day.com on their phones to receive a direct link to the NYTimes.com Today mobile site, featuring the full articles displayed on the – smaller -screens.
Let’s take a closer look at the NYT’s newest distribution partner. → Read More
