http://www.starbucksstore.com/coffee-weekender/011029291,default,pd.html?&srule=Featured&start=0&sz=20&q=times&navid=search
I was curious about it so I checked and then I found inside the package were a coffee press, a bag of coffee beans and, a card for access to The New York Times digital version. You may wonder when we need to pay to read articles on The New York Times.
From Mar, 2011 The New York Times began to charge its readers for digital content. Visitors can read 20 articles for free on The New York Times' website every month, but they will need to pay when it exceeds the limit. Besides, some restrictions apply for their smartphone or tablet. If you want to have complete access to its website by all your digital stuff including laptop, smartphone and tablet, you have to pay $8.5/week. Even though The New York Times had earned 390,000 subscribers within 10 months, the concern was the potential drop in The New York Times' website traffic when referring to The Times of London's 66% drop within 17 days after lunching a paywall. (http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41513)
Did The New York Times make a good decision? Let's think about a question. Why do people like to read news? Because we want to know what we are concerned in the shortest time. In history, newspaper was the first kind of carrier of news. Although radio and TV joined to broadcast breaking news, newspaper was still dominant. Because radio and TV can only summarize news, but newspaper was the only medium being able to describe the details. However, things changed after the Internet was invented. It can deliver the same content as newspaper, but its speed is much faster than newspaper. So people still need news, but it just does not need to be only on newspapers. Making content digital is an inevitable trend to make news industry survive. Therefore, charging for digital news would become a necessary business model.
Advertisers may be worried about the traffic, but the subscribers are a more effective target audience for 2 reasons: first, they are more engaged in The New York Times than occasional visitors; second, the advertising message can be delivered more precisely according to subscribers' data base. The other thing is that people may resist the paywall when it is just launched but they will probably come back when they cannot find out alternatives to read free news from credible sources. If the access to The New York Times is overpriced, it will be finally adjusted by market mechanism.
I just think of another successful example of MLB. In the past, fans can only watch selected games on TV. However, by well improved and highly penetrated Internet, now baseball fans can watch all the games online if they are willing to pay the annual fee for "instant convenience". Another example is not exactly about paywall but is also about "instant convenience". It is Amazon's Kindle and e-books. When Amazon started to promote its Kindle and e-books in 2008, not all the analysts were optimistic about the outcome. Nevertheless, if you see the following chart I bet you would think Jeff Bezos a man of foresight. Maybe that also can explain why he decided to buy the Washington Post. Will he use the same strategy for the Washington Post? I don't know. But I guess that he did not think he bought a newspaper. What he bought should be a news brand, which was trusted as a newspaper and will still be trusted in other forms.
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