Keller hailed early returns on TimesSelect, which grants online access to the paper's columnists only to Times subscribers and those who pay $49.95 a year, saying a "couple hundred thousand people" have signed on for the service. However, a Times spokeswoman later clarified this figure, explaining that it includes current Times subscribers, who get TimesSelect for free, saying that the paper was not disclosing how many people were paying for TimesSelect.A couple of points. First, as chest-thumping goes, this is pretty mild stuff. Where is he comparing the revenue to projections, or to the haul provided by WSJ subscribers (his self-termed arch-rivals)? Next, his unqualified reference to a "couple hundred thousand" subscribers provokes the natural question: How many print subscribers to the NYT are there, exactly? Answer: 1.25 million. Thus, Herr Keller's claim amounts to a statement that 1 of 6 print subscribers have signed up for NYTSelect. In the absence of other evidence, I'm assuming that the number of those who are actually paying for the service, rather than leaping the hurdles to (free) online access via their print subscription, are negligible. Thus my inference that since Keller claims ~200,000 subscribers, less than half (and in fact, probably less than 20%) are actually anteing up for the service.
N.B. 100,000 is a key number because Martin Nisenholtz at NYTDigital has stated in advance that they were looking for this kind of buy-in from the public to justify the service - see this pre-launch story at Editor & Publisher.
1 comment:
Talk about eating your seed corn. I still don't understand how newspaper people could be so far from "getting it". The value created by their columnists is in controlling the zeitgeist. Constrain access, destroy value.
On the other hand, I have not been able to think of a way that NYTimes could directly extract money from the value created by their columnists, with the exception of owning a backend of their books.
Of course, to cite historical precedence, the Catholic Church took hundreds of years to figure out how to extract value from controlling the zeitgeist.
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