Today in the NYTimes Martin Nisenholtz and Janet Robinson discuss the metering paywall plan. For the entire article (it’s short), click on the article link. I’ve excerpted one Q&A and added my comments.
January 21, 2010, 10:07 am
Martin Nisenholtz
Talk to The Times: Answers About Charging Online
Senior executives of The New York Times Company are answering questions from readers about the company’s decision to charge for frequent use of NYTimes.com, which will take effect in 2011. (For more details, read the company’s announcement and this article about it.)
Janet Robinson
Fielding questions is Janet L. Robinson, president and chief executive of the company, with assistance from Martin A. Nisenholtz, senior vice president for digital operations.
Q: Congrats on the decision to charge. Its absolutely the right one. Why are you waiting until 2011? – Darnell, Los Angeles
A: Ms. Robinson: Thank you for your support. Ultimately we recognize that our success will be judged by how well we execute this effort in the months to come. That is why we are waiting until 2011 to introduce this new system. We are determined to make subscribing as smooth and easy as possible. We will be working toward integrating our customer management systems so we can ensure a frictionlessand engaging user interface for subscribers. It will take some time to build, test and deploy the right systems. It will take time to get this right.
I really believe that the technical integration is going to be extremely difficult. They obviously recognize this already. Journalism Online has the same problem, only worse since they are trying to do it for hundreds if not thousands of different CMSs most of which are old and cranky.
An article titled Does It Really Take a Year to Build a Pay Wall? in MediaMemo by Peter Kafka says the same thing:
But assuming the paper does go it alone and does intend to build this thing, would it really take a year? Yes, say two publishing sources with first-hand knowledge of both pay walls and big publishing companies.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that there are at least three different problems to solve: Authenticating current print subscribers so that they can get the online paper free; installing the “meter” that measures use for nonprint subscribers; and creating a commerce engine that can take orders, process subscriptions, figure out how to provide bundled offers–i.e., the cost of online access plus, say, a Kindle or Apple (AAPL) tablet subscription–etc.
None of this stuff ought to be rocket science, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard, my pay wall experts say. Even if the Times builds its new pay wall on the bones of Times Select, the newspaper’s 2005-2007 attempt, it could easily take it a year to assemble this thing, they insist.
It’s possible that my sources are talking their book a bit–if building a pay wall were easy, there’d be less work for them. But I’m willing to take them at their word until someone convinces me otherwise.
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