The NYTimes implemented their long-discussed “paywall” today, in an attempt to make some money on online viewers. Unlike proposed paywalls designed by the folks at Fox News and The Guardian, this paywall is “loose by design.” What that means is that you’re still able to view up to 20 stories online per day, and they purposely did not make it hard to circumvent their system.
So why would a newspaper not make their paywall ultra-secure? Quite simply, they’re smart. In independent studies done by organizations not affiliated with content producers (basically any University study and nothing by the MPAA, RIAA, etc) researchers have found that people only pirate things they can’t afford. When products are priced too high, piracy increases, and oftentimes it deters people from purchasing legit versions. Microsoft released Windows Vista in China and priced it at about $180 USD. The Chinese version of XP was priced at about $20. A month after Vista’s release, Microsoft had only sold a total of seven copies of Vista in all of China. Windows XP, being a much more affordable product, sold in the tens of thousands of copies. When Microsoft dropped the price of XP to $20, the number of pirated copies dropped significantly, to the point that it was easier in the long term to purchase a legit version of XP than buy a pirated version (for a tenth of the cost.) The same thing happens with music and movies. Studios have realized that in Asian markets they can’t market legit DVD’s at American prices. They now sell “Region 5 DVD’s” for about $3USD. As a result, Chinese pirates aren’t bootlegging any DVD’s released as a “Region 5.”
The New York times is also pretty much THE place for news online. If they locked down their paywall, sites would stop linking to their stories, and they’d lose readers. Its in their interest to maintain their userbase at the expense of a couple of paywall subscriptions.
The last factor comes down to development cost. The NYTimes would basically have to re-vamp their website to program in serious DRM. By applying a “loose” paywall, they didn’t have to spend millions on re-doing their website.
Even though its pretty cheap, and even though you get 20 free stories, people have released hacks for the NYTimes site. Pay for your digital subscriptions, or better yet pay for home delivery. For those of you who are eating stewed tomatoes every night and stealing wi-fi from your neighbors, you can drag and drop the NYCLEAN bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar and read all of the articles for free.
(on programmer’s note, 4 lines of code!)
