BBC News: The top 100 sites on the internet
Friday, 12 March 2010, 17:34
"Explore this interactive graphic to find out which are the biggest sites on the internet, as measured by the Nielsen company. This feature is part of SuperPower, a season of programmes exploring the power of the internet."
MediaBuyerPlanner: ‘New York Times’ Unbundles for Digital Editions
Tuesday, 9 March 2010, 22:04
"The New York Times, which already offers a digital version via Amazon’s Kindle, plans to offer a separate version of its Book Review."
New York Magazine: A Look Inside the Life of News Corp. Mogul and Raging Septuagenarian Rupert Murdoch
Monday, 1 March 2010, 19:13
"While others may see him as an opportunistic predator, ready to lay waste to whatever falls under his gaze, Murdoch sees himself as a moralist, the enemy of entrenched, arbitrary power. … Google and the Times may be on opposite ends of the media spectrum, but they share an arrogance about their place in the world. And Murdoch, from the beginning, has found purpose in teaching such institutions hard lessons."
NYTimes.com: RMG to Brand 850 Screens as the NYTimes.com Today Network
Monday, 1 March 2010, 17:15
"Starting Monday, video screens in coffee shops, casual eateries and airport newsstands in five major cities will display the work of The New York Times, under a deal with RMG Networks, a major owner of such screens."
Reuters: The NYT’s blogs are set to be paywalled
Sunday, 21 February 2010, 15:42
Felix Salmon: "That shocked me: blogs rely on loyal readers who come back to read them often. But few blog readers are loyal enough to pay for the privilege of reading that blog. And if you’re someone who participates regularly in the Freakonomics comments section, for instance, you’re going to be very annoyed if you’re forced to buy a subscription to the entire nytimes.com site in order to do so. My guess is that if Nisenholtz does this, a lot of the branded blogs on nytimes.com, including both Freakonomics and Paul Krugman, will simply leave and set (back) up on their own."
New York Times: People Share News Online That Inspires Awe, Researchers Find
Tuesday, 9 February 2010, 21:11
"Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have intensively studied the New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for more than six months, analyzing the content of thousands of articles and controlling for factors like the placement in the paper or on the Web home page. … most of all, readers wanted to share articles that inspired awe, an emotion that the researchers investigated after noticing how many science articles made the list."
Nieman Journalism Lab: Play Paywall!, the new web game sweeping the newspaper industry
Tuesday, 26 January 2010, 17:49
Genius way to illustrate the conundrum facing every news executive thinking of raising a subscription barrier: "Paywall!, our revenue game … allows you to explore the situation at the [New York] Times or at any other news site. …"
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Jeff Jarvis’s cockeyed economics
Saturday, 23 January 2010, 19:19
Paul Carr defends the New York Times metered access plan with reference to economist Hal Varian's "versioning" of digital goods: "Different consumers may have radically different values for a particular information good, so techniques for differential pricing become very important … [One] particular aspect of differential pricing [is] known as quality discrimination or versioning … The point of versioning is to get the consumers to sort themselves into different groups according to their willingness to pay."
Society for News Design: The making of the New York Times’s Netflix graphic
Saturday, 23 January 2010, 12:16
How the New York Times built an interactive graphic based on 1.9 million records of video rental queues obtained from Netflix.
Reuters: Running the numbers on the New York Times paywall
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:59
Felix Salmon: "[John] Gapper seems to think that online subscription revenues can make newspapers profitable again; they can’t. In fact, insofar as the paywall makes any sense at all, it does so only as a tool to boost print subscriptions. … [The] NYT is a mass-market general news publication: it’s not the kind of place where high-end business-to-business advertisers will pay $90 CPMs to reach C-suite executives."
FT.com: Charge for news or bleed red ink
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:55
John Gapper: "The point that link economy enthusiasts miss, I think, is that the trade-off between subscription and advertising is not a zero-sum game. Rates for online display ads have been falling steadily as competition has proliferated, with most sites now finding it hard to get more than $4 per 1,000 impressions on their pages (or $14m for the 3.5bn hits on all US newspaper sites monthly). But sites such as the FT and WSJ – or some health or energy websites – can charge $90 or more. The fact that customers are registering and paying not only shows commitment but provides publishers with personal data with which to target advertisements better."
Reuters: The economics of the New York Times paywall
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:50
Felix Salmon: "it’ll be much easier to change the number of articles that people can read for free than it will be to change the price of a monthly or annual subscription. … the experience of the FT suggests that there’s a strong temptation to [gradually reduce the number of free articles per month]: it has been dialing down n to a very low level, as it becomes increasingly addicted to online subscription revenue."
Techcrunch: The New York Times’ Online Meter Will Hardly Move The Needle
Friday, 22 January 2010, 08:44
"[At] $10 per online subscriber, the New York Times would only be replacing the online advertising revenues it lost last year. If it can charge $15 or get more than 300,000 subscribers, the numbers start to make more sense. And if the meter drives more people to subscribe to the print paper, that’s even better for the New York Times (and, in fact, I suspect that growing print subscribers is really what this is all about)."
NYTimes.com: New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site
Wednesday, 20 January 2010, 16:05
"Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site…. But executives of The New York Times Company said they could not yet answer fundamental questions about the plan, like how much it would cost or what the limit would be on free reading."
