New York Times Case Analysis

SMWA Group Assignment-1

The New York Times Paywall case

Submitted by

Bharat Ramshankar Punukollu (71620013)

Chandrasekar V (71620018)

Shweta Pisharoti (71620065)

Vineet Garg (71620090)

1. Is Paywall working? How would you evaluate the current Paywall compared to the two previous ones? Do you think it’s appropriately designed compared to the Financial Times and WSJ?

Exhibit 11 showed us that NYT subscription rate was 450$ per year which was 350% more than ‘USA Today’ ( We are not taking Wall street Journal and Economist in consideration as they are in specialized news/content services) and  still manages 390,000 digital subscriptions. Exhibit 13 showed us that in online newspaper web traffic NYT was way ahead than “USA Today” It seems strategy is working for NYT. The current paywall is different from the previous paywalls in the following

• The first paywall was all or nothing paywall were the user doesn’t get to access any content without paying but the current paywall was allowing 20 free articles/month & some more free articles/content through google & social media
• The second paywall was only charging for exclusive content by renowned authors (differential pricing according to type of content) but the current paywall puts restrictions only on number of free articles & not on the type of articles

The WSJ & The Financial Times were more bulletproof paywall were the user has to be a registered user of the portal to access the subscribed content but in The NY Times the paywall is leaky as any unregistered user can access 20 free articles/month & more articles through google.com redirection (5 more articles/month) & social media sites like facebook.com & twitter.com (any number of linked articles from these portals). We feel that these initiatives are necessary to increase the footfalls to the website and to increase the online advertising revenue.

As market segment of NYT broader than specialized WSJ and Economist (more related to financial and macroeconomics) It is appropriate for NYT to package its product in such a way so that it should have little impact on online visits, which may not in case of later ones. So it was appropriately designed.

1. Why are newspapers in trouble? What is the goal of the Times in creating the Paywall?

Reasons why Print media is in Trouble:

1. Internet penetration
2. Free digital news and contents
3. Falling on advertising revenue
4. Reading habits of new generation

Main goal of Times to creating the paywall was to generate revenue from its digital edition with little/no impact on visits on its website and also as world is moving from analog to digital, so it maintains its leadership.