I've resisted paid sites on the internet so far, but today I decided to pay by the article for access to the New York Times archive. I usually try unsuccessfully to monitor the NYT and make sure I read or capture anything really good before it goes into their paid archives.
NYT lets you have free access to the last 7 days or so. Today, I tried out searching their archives for China, one of my current passionate interests. First, the search is very well done. There's advanced search and you can narrow your search to particular sections of the paper, that sort of thing.
I quickly found an article that was interesting that I hadn't read. It's called Shanghai Journal: A City's Traffic Plans Are Snarled by China's Car Culture. A great little 1,000 word read.
In order to read it, I could pay $3.95 for the article or buy a 4-pack for $7.95 which halved the per article price. That hooked me, so kept reading. The 10-pack is $15.95, not much less but $1.60 per article started seeming pretty cheap. I decided to go for 10. There has to be at least 10 articles in the archive that I would pay good money for (probably more like 1000 - hmmm that's $1,595. Yikes!).
I found out as I was nearing the check out that I would only have 30 days to select those 10 articles after which the unused articles would expire.
So, now they've got me looking in the NYT to find good articles to make sure I'll find 10 before my 30 days are up. That gets me more familiar with NYT. I've never been a subscriber, so don't know my way around all that well.
It seems like this approach will be a great way for NYT to make some money. In their case, I'm not worried about them. Their paper readership is still expanding and I think it's because people have gotten hooked by reading current articles free online. NYT has some of the best reporters and writers on the planet, so they are set.
Other papers probably won't fair so well unless they can distinguish themselves for excellence or local coverage.
OK. That's all for now, I gotta get back to my China search. Knowing me, I'll find 10 articles in the next hour and be popping another $15.95 soon. I can't say that 10 articles are worth more than something like the new Cold Play CD, but it's not bad. Part 2.
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