Now I think you are the one overestimating costs. Those might have taken a small fortune to record and mix in the pre-digital era, but now any kid in his basement can get the same sound quality for basically free. The cost, of course, lies in the content creator(s) making the sounds in the first place. But the other production costs are dramatically lower now.

$1 per week. Pay as you go.

or

$40 per year. Auto-renewed.

What they’re missing is that we (average consumers) will pay a small meaningless amount easily, casually, and there are 100x more of us than there are people willing to pay $15 per week, or whatever.

Look at the app store. Learn. Adapt.

As for pricing the online content, I want to agree with other readers here. It’s deliberate. A confusing three card monty that ensures people will continue to pay for print, maybe even opt for print even though they have been getting the digital content for free.

I want to agree, but can’t. Some of these old world companies simply are not capable of making decisions from the user’s perspective, no matter how hard they try.

The NYT does not want people to read it online. They want you to realize it’s simpler just to get the printed version and be done with it.

By making the online approach messy, you get the feeling you’ll be missing out on something one way or another, and the printed version is guaranteed to have ALL of what the NYT offers. So simple!

My feeling is that they should just have substituted apps for paper. Continue to have what is essentially 2 products:

• free edition, Web only, traditional newspaper style
• paid edition, choose paper or app, in-depth articles, videos, info graphics, push the envelope

They have so few subscribers. If they had a goal to sign up 10% of iTunes account holders as subscribers, that would be 25 times more subscribers than they have ever had. And iTunes is global, not just US. But then again, this is a publication that recently said that pro-US propaganda is part of their editorial policy, i.e. water boarding by US perpetrators is not torture, and by anyone else, it is.

So they are clearly not getting it at NY Times. Likely they have to go bankrupt to learn their lesson.

I should be able to subscribe at an annual, reasonable rate (in the $30-60 range, not $180) and enjoy the Times on all my devices: MacBook Pro, iPod Touch, and iPad.

Believe me, this pricing scheme will change in time– it will take them time to admit that they got it wrong, but a revised plan will happen.

If I subscribe on, say, my iPad will I be able to see everything that’s in the paper version? And if I missed yesterday’s issue, can I go back and read it too?

That’s all that matters to me.

Thank you.

For the NYTImes, there is no reason to pay.

One must also factor in the loss of quality and credibility of the NYTimes over the decades. It once was an outstanding newspaper but has become a leftwing rag sheet hardly fit for the outcroppings of a dog.

Did I mention that I have a standing bet with each of my friends that, on any given day, I can find at least ten grammar mistakes on the front page of the NYTimes? Do I want to pay for illiteracy? Simply: the quality has been sacrificed to quantity.

Moreover, I am so terribly tired of reading the mindless cant that passes for intelligent argument on the Upper Weird Side of Manhattan. Shut the Hell Up!, the NYTimes explains…

The technology section and travel are still good but everything else has been sacrificed to the pseudo-nobless oblige viewpoint that assumes that either there is no other side to an issue or it is malevolent.

The book reviews are part and parcel of this viewpoint – an exercise in kool-aid drinking. Don’t start me on the Sunday Magazine which was once a delight but has become a dumbed down version of People Magazine. Must everything be sacrificed for a 12 year old mentality for page views?

For this nincompoopism I should pay? I do not think so.

It is a pity how long and far the NYTImes has fallen. Right now, it is worth nothing.

Thank you Frédéric for your insights.

But I don’t. And I think the Times underestimates the number of people who simply can’t squeeze $15 a month out of their budgets for their paper.

Why not charge $60 a year? I’ll bet you’d get 10x the number of subscriptions and thus 3x the amount of money. This is not a physical paper where readers are very expensive to service. It’s the web (and/or apps), where readers are dirt cheap to service. I’d pay $60 a year for the Times; there’s no way I can pay $200, let alone $440.

D

So, you pay for a subscription to the New York Times, which you receive by email and not by a paper product that costs fuel to deliver.

I would expect that once I pay for a subscription, it would be free of encumbrance such as advertising, but you say the emailed New York Times still contains advertising.

Not only that, but I can still view some of the content outside of the “paywall”, where there is Google advertising. What do the paying New York Times advertisers think of that, sharing their newspaper with other advertisers? What do the paying Google advertisers think of that, sharing their paid content with the newspaper’s advertisers?

Surely after a decade of iTunes, commerce should have learned that 1. people will accept “free” if it’s almost as good; 2. people will pay a “reasonable” price if it’s convenient, good quality and doesn’t come with the hassle such as advertising offered by “free” services.

The New York Times appears to be offering a third way: you pay a subscription, you get the content but with advertising we make money from, and sometimes even with advertising that we make money from by selling it to two separate classes of advertisers, each of which think they are paying to get an exclusive.