Tech wrap: Another brick in the paywall
The New York Times will start charging for full access to its articles on phones, tablet computers and the Web from March 28. You’ll still be able to access as many articles as you want through Facebook and Twitter, writes Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff. Felix Salmon thinks readers will go elsewhere.
Toshiba said an assembly line in Japan making liquid crystal displays would be closed for a month, and PC maker Lenovo voiced worries over parts in the latest threats to electronics supply chains from Japan’s devastating earthquake.
Sales of e-books in January increased by more than 115 percent compared to the same time the year before, a report released by the Association of American Publishers said.
Activity from Rustock, one of the world’s most prolific spam email networks, ground to a halt, apparently thanks to a coordinated effort by Internet service providers and software vendors, writes The Wall Street Journal’s Michael Hickins.
Best-selling author Jane McGonigal is spreading a message that playing games, whether electronic or physical, is not a waste of time but can improve lives and solve real world problems.
Dear NYT: Your online content is still free
The New York Times announced that it will begin to charge people to access its digital content as it tries for a second time to diversify its revenue stream in the face of declining advertising sales and a drop-off in print readership.
Starting March 28, you’ll be able to read 20 articles a month without paying. On your 21st article, you’ll have the 3 digital news packages to choose from: $15 a month for Website and a mobile phone app access; $20 for Web access and an iPad app; and $35 for unlimited access, the paper wrote.
Is it worth it?
Felix Salmon thinks $15 for four weeks might be cheap compared to the cost of a print subscription, but $195 per year is enough to drive readers elsewhere.
Folks here in Canada are the first to suffer from NY Times withdrawal. Apparently, we’re fertile testing ground, allowing “the company time to work out any software issues before the system goes live in the United States.”
But if we had a a digital subscriber option it certainly wasn’t apparent when I reached the 21st article, faced with a standard login page.
Registering and logging in produced different results; I could access as many articles as I wanted and there were no restrictions and no digital subscription option.
Just tried it from BC. Got the message saying I had “4 of 20 articles” remaining or what-have-you. I let it get to 1/20, then closed the page, cleared my history (cookies, etc), went back to NYTimes.com and continued viewing articles. Eventually I got down to 4/20 again. Cleared history, kept surfing.
Whatever, NYTimes…whatever.
AOL and its Content Strategy
AOL turned 25 today, prompting Chief Executive Tim Armstrong to make the rounds with co-founder Steve Case to celebrate the milestone. AOL has a colorful and much chronicled history, which we won’t go into detail here. What is most interesting to this reporter is not AOL’s past but rather its plan to pitch itself forward as a content company just at the point when traditional media — we’re looking at you newspapers – are undergoing wrenching operational changes.
All of this is to say that content, especially good local content, is expensive to produce even when the plug has been pulled from the printing presses.
Yet AOL executives believe there is a vein to mine and have been snapping up professional journalists while casting wide nets to capture “citizen reporters” eager to get their names out by covering the goings-on and activities at the neighborhood level. AOL is hiring expensive professionals to complement inexpensive user-generated content tied to search engine optimization. Ad dollars, the company hopes, should follow thanks to its technology platforms that AOL believes can maximize ad revenue.
When asked about advertising opportunities going forward during an interview today, Armstrong relayed this story –days after upbeat broadcast executives unveiled their prime time programming to advertisers known as the upfronts.
Armstrong had met with one of of the top 20 advertisers in the world last week and said, “This was the first year that they have actually planned digital before they did their TV upfronts. I think that is a trend happening in the industry. … [The] industry analysis is probably undercounting the fact that you are seeing fundamental shifts that people are starting to plan digital before they plan the TV upfronts. My guess is there will be more and more pressure in that direction going forward.”
Case, who is now the chairman and CEO of Revolution, added that more and more people are spending time online at the expense of reading magazines and newspapers or watching TV. ”Obviously advertising is going to track that audience not just the number of people using it but the amount of time they are using it. You can debate how quickly that will happen but you can’t debate inevitably the dollars will shift towards the digital medium because that is where consumer attention has shifted.”
